


Starting Over

by Philosopher_King



Series: Whatever is done from love [12]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Again because I can't seem to stop thinking about it, Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Angst, Angst and Porn, Bloodplay, Discussion of BDSM, Discussions of topping and bottoming, Dysfunctional Family, Family Drama, Fun with Fruit, I have a scar fetish apparently, I hope that's not too morbid, Loki Gets a Hug, Loki Needs a Hug, Loki has daddy issues, Loki is going to deal with his issues, M/M, Mention of Rape/Non-con, Not Thor: Ragnarok (2017) Compliant, Past Torture, Psychological Trauma, Reconciliation, Reconciliation Sex, References to Suicide Attempt, Scars, Sibling Incest, Switching, Thor will make sure of it, Very Minor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-09
Updated: 2017-05-26
Packaged: 2018-09-23 01:36:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 22,130
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9634976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Philosopher_King/pseuds/Philosopher_King
Summary: After the events of "Age of Ultron," Thor returns to Asgard to tell his father what he learned from his vision about the Infinity Stones. To his great surprise, Odin tells him he already knows; to his greater surprise, Odin is not really Odin.Thor and Loki have a long-overdue conversation about their past and their future (and more than conversation), and start the work of mending the rift between them.





	1. Revelation

**Author's Note:**

> This work is listed as part 12 of my Thorki series, [Whatever is done from love](http://archiveofourown.org/series/421000), but that's a little misleading because it's actually on a separate timeline from the post- _Ragnarok_ fics listed as 9-11. I wrote this one before _Ragnarok_ came out (if you didn't notice the posting date, it should become obvious once you start reading a bit); it was sort of my fantasy version of how the conversation would go once Thor found out Loki was still alive. So really you should consider this #9b in the series, and it would probably make the most sense if read after installments 1-8. However, the story that's most important for understanding this one is Part 8, [Fraternizing with the Enemy](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6819373) (this will become more apparent in the second chapter); and it also makes a fair number of references to the work before that, [Winter, Autumn, and Spring](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7779421/chapters/17745055). But you can probably figure out what's going on without reading any of the others... though I do encourage you to :D

Thor felt a deep unease as he strode up the long aisle of the throne room toward the golden dais from which the king held court.  He had not thought to be here again so soon after he had told his father that he did not intend to take the throne after him.  Odin had not reacted as badly as Thor had been expecting, but he had made clear enough that he was not happy about the news, and Thor still dreaded to face him again.  He felt uncomfortable, too, with pulling rank to gain an audience with the king ahead of the substantial line of nobles and commoners waiting to present their pleas or their grievances.  He told himself that it was the weightiness of his mission, not his station, that justified his taking precedence.

Thor stopped a few paces from the base of the steps up to the dais—a respectful distance, but close enough to read Odin’s face—and fell to one knee.  “My king, I must beg an audience with you,” he said, as custom prescribed.

“Rise, my son,” Odin said, a hint of impatience in his tone.  Thor stood, but kept his gaze lowered.  “I would have put you off until tomorrow, in recognition of the petitioners who have been waiting since this morning,” Odin continued, not a little pointedly.  “But I see that urgency is written all over your face.  What troubles you?”

Thor cleared his throat, wondering where to start.  Should he tell his father about the Avengers’ latest battle, about the Mind Stone in the scepter Loki had wielded in Midgard, or the mortal children who had been altered with its aid?  No, he decided; it was best not to mention Loki at all, and come straight to the foremost reason for his visit.  “Father, I have bathed in the Norns’ pool, and they granted me a vision.  Concerning the Infinity Stones.”

Odin’s eye narrowed at Thor’s words.  “Such a matter demands discretion as well as haste,” he said sharply.  He raised his voice to be heard clearly by the guards standing at attention along the sides of the hall and by the solemn robed councilors waiting in attendance behind the throne, ready to offer their sage advice in some supplicant’s case.  “Leave us,” he commanded.  “And Steward—”  Old Hœnir, who had been the taciturn and efficient doorkeeper for as long as Thor could remember, poked his head in from the hallway.  “Tell the petitioners who are still waiting that I will hear them tomorrow.  See that those who have traveled some distance are provided with lodging for the night, and a meal.”  Hœnir nodded once, then vanished again.

Odin waited in silence while the guards filed out through the side doors closest to them, and the councilors quietly exited through a door behind the throne.  “What have you seen?” Odin asked quietly after the door had snapped closed after the last councilor.

“They only helped me to see what I should have seen already,” Thor confessed.  “Three Infinity Stones have surfaced in only the past four years—”

“Four,” Odin cut in.

Thor was unsure whether this was intended as a correction or a confirmation.  “Yes, four years,” he repeated, brow furrowed.

“Four _Infinity Stones_ in four years,” Odin clarified.  “Word has reached me from Nova Prime—the leader of the Nova Empire, in the Andromeda Galaxy.”  Thor bit back an irritated sigh.  He _did_ know who Nova Prime was; Odin himself had made sure of that.  “The Power Stone has come into her keeping, after some Kree fanatic very nearly used it to destroy Xandar.”

 _Four in four years._ Thor’s stomach lurched unpleasantly.  “This all but proves it.  Father, someone is gathering them—for what purpose, I do not know.”

Odin gave his son a long, considering gaze; a deepening of the creases in his broad forehead, etched there by millennia of weary work and care, told Thor that a debate was being waged behind that gaze.  At last he sighed and said, “I do.”

Thor was startled.  “What?  How do you know?” he pressed.  “What have you seen that I have not?”

Odin chuckled dryly.  “Many things,” he pointed out.  “But only one that matters now.”

 _Why is he wasting time with these foolish riddles?_ “Please, Father, tell me what you know.”  The stern note he injected into his voice kept it from being a plea.

Odin took another moment to regard him pensively, his lips pressed tightly together.  “I will,” he said slowly, “but first you must promise me something.”

The cold weight of dread added itself to the anxiety that was twisting Thor’s insides.  “Of course!  Anything.”

In an instant, Odin’s pensive look was replaced by a reproving glare.  “Two things.  First, promise me that you will never answer a request for a promise with ‘anything.’  Always ask what you are promising first.”

Thor gaped for a moment.  _Is this really the most pressing matter right now?_ “Yes, of course,” he agreed quickly.  “That was foolish.”

“Good, we agree.  Second: you must promise that you will not fly into a rage when I tell you what I know and how I know it.”

 _Fly into a—?_  Thor dragged himself back from the edge of doing just that.  “Why would I ‘fly into a rage’?” he asked as calmly as he could manage.

“I am afraid I must secure this promise from you before I can tell you even that,” Odin replied tightly.

“Very well,” Thor said, still barely reining in his frustration.  “I promise I will not ‘fly into a rage.’”

Odin shook his head; he was not convinced.  “I want you to swear it by what you hold most dear.”

Thor closed his eyes and pictured Frigga’s knowing, tolerant smile.  He opened them again and said, “I swear upon my good right arm and the star-forged hammer I wield with it, I swear upon the valiant companions and the Realms that it defends: I will not lose my temper when you tell me what you know and how you know it.”

Odin nodded slowly, his intent gaze promising that he would hold Thor to his oath.  Then a wave of shimmering green light swept over Odin’s figure, and where it passed, he changed: silver-white hair was replaced by gleaming black, the single blue eye and gold eyepatch by eyes of icy green, the golden robes of kingship with the strange black leather and weathered-metal armor—part Asgardian, part Xandarian, and part Kree—of a homeless mercenary from everywhere and nowhere.  “I know who seeks the Infinity Stones and for what purpose,” Loki said heavily, “because I glimpsed it in his mind.”

For a few moments, Thor’s mind went blank.  The first thought that entered it, when thoughts became possible again, was _This cannot be.  Loki is dead.  I am dreaming._  “I am dreaming,” he said aloud.  “I will wake up now.”  Sometimes that worked, when he realized that he was dreaming again of watching his mother die, watching Loki die, helpless to stop the blade that pierced him, helpless to stop the last breath from leaving his gray lips…

Loki’s lips curved into an ironic smile, but his eyes were sympathetic.  “You won’t wake up, because this is not a dream.”

Thor reached up to touch his own face; it felt as solid as ever.  He shook his head sharply, but the scene did not change.  It began to sink in, like a white-hot blade into his heart, that this was real.  “Loki, how…?”  _How did you survive?  How are you here?  Why didn’t you_ tell _me?_ But a swelling heat in his chest seemed to block his throat and no more sound would come out.

Loki’s face grew wary as he watched Thor struggle to speak, to breathe even, to believe his eyes.  “Remember your promise, Thor,” he warned.

Anger helped Thor to find his voice again.  “You were dead,” he said, an accusation.  “You died in my arms.  I _felt_ you die.”

Loki replied with a thin-lipped smile.  “Yes, and that’s another conversation we’ll need to have at some point… but we were speaking of the Infinity Stones.”

“The Infinity— how can you—”  Thor found himself rushing toward the throne as if carried on the tide of his anger; he was scarcely aware of his own feet moving.  “Loki, where is our father?” he demanded.

The wariness in Loki’s face sharpened into the beginning of fear.  He had been holding Gungnir upright at his side, but now he brought it athwart his body, gripped in both hands, to shield himself.  _“Your_ father,” he corrected Thor through gritted teeth.

“No, Loki, our father, _our_ father, yours and mine.  The father who raised us both.  Where is he?  What have you done with him?”  Thor did not stop charging forward—his legs, like his rage, seemed to have a will of their own—until he felt himself repelled at the base of the steps, as if by the wrong pole of a magnet.

Loki relaxed his stance slightly, satisfied that he was safe from Thor’s rage for now.  “He is in Midgard, and I assure you that he is quite safe.”

That certainly was not the answer Thor had been expecting.  “Midgard? Why is he in Midgard?”

Loki’s self-satisfied smile held an edge of cruelty.  “Because I sent him there.  He seemed to think that being stripped of your powers and banished to Midgard was a suitable punishment for arrogance, stupidity, and risking the lives of your loved ones, not to mention untold numbers of your people.  I thought it was only fair that the same standard should be applied to him.”

Thor was shaking his head in horrified disbelief.  One side of Loki’s mouth quirked slightly higher.  “I thought you might appreciate the poetic justice, but apparently not.”

“You stripped him of his powers? And you think he is _safe_?”

Loki looked unimpressed.  “Oh, he is a wily old fox, that one.  He can take care of himself quite well enough, with or without magic.”

“And how did you overpower him, to usurp the throne and banish him?” Thor demanded, as thunder growled outside.  “Even in his grief and old age, I know that his strength and skill outmatched yours.”

Loki raised his eyebrows and ignored Thor’s attempt to bait him.  “There wasn’t much overpowering about it,” he said coolly.  “He was so overcome with guilt over Mother’s death and mine—however temporary—that he yielded to me, and said he deserved whatever punishment I judged fitting.  I imagine he was expecting something much worse than he got…”

“Your _temporary_ death—you _jest_ about it—how can you jest?”  Again the swelling feeling in Thor’s chest seemed to rise up to choke him.  “For _two years_ you let me believe you were dead.  For two years I’ve mourned you.  And now I find you’ve been alive all this time, and you never deigned to _tell me…”_

Loki at least had the grace to look pained.  “It was for everyone’s safety—yours and all of Asgard’s as well as mine—as you will understand once I’ve explained…”

“How could you explain this?” Thor roared at him.  “How could you _possibly_ explain?”  Without even realizing it, he had called Mjölnir to his hand and raised it as if to strike—and found that, slowly, with some resistance, Mjölnir could penetrate the shield Loki had called up.

Loki realized it at the same instant, and panic flared in his eyes.  “Thor, please set your weapon aside and _listen,_ for once.”  He kept his tone level—he would not be heard to beg—but he could not keep the slight tremor out of it.

Thor’s incredulous laugh was more a bark.  “You want me to disarm myself while you are still armed with the rune-spear of kingship?  How great a fool do you think me?”

Loki stood frozen for a moment as he wrestled with the choice before him.  Then, abruptly, he tossed Gungnir aside and held up his hands to show that they were empty.  “Not as great a fool as I am,” he said with a shaky smile, “for you can summon your weapon from a distance.”

Thor set Mjölnir down at the base of the steps to the dais.  He felt no resistance as he climbed them.  “You think I have forgotten the knives you can call from your pocket dimensions?”

“It seems we must both be such great fools as to trust one another,” Loki said, almost earnestly.

Thor reached the top of the steps and kept walking forward, forcing Loki to back away from him until the backs of his knees brushed the edge of the throne itself. _“Trust_ you?”  All of Thor’s rage still seethed behind his tone of quiet menace.  “You ask me to _trust_ you, after all you have done?”

Loki’s ironic, contemptuous smile was almost convincing, but Thor knew that he donned it as armor over his fear.  “You swore that you would kill me if I betrayed you.  Do you mean to keep that oath?”

Thor paused a long moment, letting Loki wonder and tremble a little longer.  Then at last he said in a low voice, “No, Loki, I will not kill you.”

Loki’s smile broadened and grew more contemptuous, but his fear did not seem to abate.  “What, then?  Will you find some other, less lasting punishment for my faithlessness?”  His lip curled into a strange sneer, taunting, lascivious.  “Will you have your way with me, perhaps?  Force yourself on me, here on the throne from which your father ruled?”  He allowed his knees to buckle so that he was half sitting; though his legs were parted suggestively, his knuckles were white where they gripped the wrought-gold arms of the throne.

All at once Thor was horrified with himself; horrified with the threatening pose he had adopted, taking heedless advantage of his greater bulk and strength; horrified that Loki could even think it of him. “No, of course—” he stammered, immediately backing away, his hands raised in a helpless attempt at conciliation.  “Never, I could _never_ do such a thing—”

Loki’s mouth still twisted in an ironic smile, but it was smaller now, and slightly sad.  “Ah, but what if I wanted you to?” he asked quietly, seemingly half to himself.

“Wanted me to…?”  It seemed a contradiction in terms.  “That does not make any sense.”

“No, indeed, it does not,” Loki acknowledged, then laughed—nervously, Thor thought—and settled himself more comfortably on the throne.  “You could not possibly rape me, and yet you swore to kill me.  Strange how people seem to order the severity of those two crimes, when I imagine that the great majority of people would rather be raped than killed.”

“Loki, I…”  Thor had no idea how to respond to this strange philosophical observation (as was so often the case when Loki made them), so he passed over it in silence, and instead confessed in a low voice: “I could not kill you, either.”

Loki smiled again, with vicious delight.  “So you swore falsely—the noble warrior of Asgard, whose word of honor is his bond!  And yet they call _me_ the liar.”

“I did not know it was a false oath when I swore it,” Thor protested—though in truth he felt it deepened his guilt rather than lessening it.

“Oh, indeed?” Loki said, his teeth still bared.  “And what, pray tell, brought you to this realization?”

Thor sought Loki’s eyes and told him the unadorned truth: “I realized that no matter how I may try to deny it, I am and always will be your brother.”

The cruel rictus faded from Loki’s face.  He searched Thor’s eyes for something—exaggeration or dishonesty, perhaps—and after a time his gaze softened, and a small crease appeared between his brows; but he said nothing.

When Thor realized that Loki was not going to reply, he covered the sting of his disappointment by adding sternly, “But that does not mean that I am not still furious with you.  Or that I will not exact a punishment for your deceptions.”

“Oh?  As you have ruled out death and ravishment, what punishment did you have in mind?”  The sneering smile was back, nor had the bitterness gone from Loki’s voice.

Trust Loki to make _Thor_ feel guilty for reproaching his brother with his own crimes.  “You will help me find our father and bring him back to Asgard.”

Loki’s gaze hardened again, and his mouth tightened into a pinched line.  “And what if I judge that he has not yet served an appropriate term of punishment?”

“That is not your judgment to make,” Thor warned.

“Then whose judgment is it?” Loki all but snarled.

“No one’s,” Thor said harshly; but at the genuine pain in Loki’s face, he softened.  “I know you still blame him for Mother’s death, but surely his own grief is punishment enough.”

Loki looked at first taken aback, then offended, then increasingly angry.  “For Mother’s death?  You think that is all I blame him for?”

Thor tried hastily to placate him—“No, of course not,” he began—but Loki ignored him.

“Let me enumerate his sins.  He lied to me all my life about who and what I am.  He could have told me at any point during my childhood—he could have _explained_ to me why I was so often ill as a child, why I could never bear the heat, why things frosted over when I was angry or afraid.  But instead he let me find out under the worst possible circumstances—when I was fighting for my life against them, fighting for _our_ lives—that I am the kin of our most hated enemies, a creature that I had always been taught to regard as savage, vicious, cowardly, scarcely better than a beast.  He claimed that he never told me ‘because he wanted to protect me from the truth,’ ‘because he never wanted me to feel different.’  Well, he failed spectacularly at that, didn’t he?  And then he conveniently _fell asleep_ when I needed him most, leaving me with a weight of responsibility that would have been difficult enough to bear even if I _hadn’t_ just had my entire sense of my identity shattered, but since I had… well.”

Loki paused his tirade, apparently just for breath, but Thor still took the opportunity to try to calm him down.  “Loki, please…”

“Oh, but I’m not finished yet!”  Loki stood up from the throne and began walking toward Thor, slowly and inexorably, taking a turn at driving _him_ back.  “When he did finally wake to see how _well_ the little Jötun foundling had ruled in his absence—which is to say, when he woke to find me suspended over an abyss, in the physical as well as every other sense—all he could think to say to me was ‘No.’  And then, when I returned after a year in the Void, having miraculously survived the _suicide_ that _he drove me to,_ did he ask me _why_ I tried to invade Midgard?  Did he ask me what had befallen me during the year I spent Urðr-knows-where?  Of course not; he simply assumed I am as power-mad as the father he stole me from—as power-mad as the father who raised me—and threw me away, left me to die forgotten in the dungeons to hide his shame, the shame that he could not civilize the monster after all.”

Thor’s heart seemed to twist in his chest; this was what Loki thought of their father?  Thor could hardly find it in himself to defend him, but still he felt obligated to make the attempt: “Loki, I’m sure that’s not what he…”

“And you still think two years’ exile in Midgard is enough?  I suppose it must be, if three days was punishment enough for nearly starting a war…”

“Loki, listen to me, _please,”_ Thor tried again; his attempts to rein in his brother’s mounting anger were growing increasingly desperate.

But Loki did not want to listen.  “He _never asked!”_ he repeated, his face contorted with rage and pain.  “He never asked what happened to me, why I did what I did.  ‘All this because Loki desired a throne’—that was all he needed to know.  Did it never occur to him to ask why _that_ throne?  Did he never wonder why the boy who fell was not the man who returned?  Was it what he’d expected from me all along?  _Why did he never ask?”_ And then, to Thor’s surprise and horror, the rage that twisted Loki’s face turned into sobs, and his flashing eyes spilled over with tears.

Loki had been sensitive as a child, prone to cry at what others might consider small hurts or slights or disappointments.  When he had grown old enough to join the other noble children of the palace at play, they mocked him for it, called him weak, babyish, womanish, unmanly.  Even before adolescence, Loki had learned to keep his tears—and along with them, it seemed, his genuine smiles—to himself.  Thor had grown up to be free with his emotions, to weep unabashedly for fallen comrades or lost loves, even at a bard’s haunting rendition of a tragic tale.  But Loki never unlearned the lesson that vulnerability was weakness, that tears were a source of shame.  He wept in the presence of others only when his anguish was so great that he could not hold it back, and even then would try to hide his tears, to turn aside or cover his face or find a way to escape.

So when Thor saw Loki crying openly, he felt like a child again, watching his little brother fall and skin his knee when their mother was not there to dry his tears and kiss it better.  Loki’s wounds were too deep to salve with such simple comfort, but Thor could think of nothing to do but to fold his brother in his arms and let Loki cry on his shoulder.

Loki stiffened when he saw Thor step closer—it was only minutes since they had been threatening each other with violence—and he did not relax when Thor put his arms around him.  He resisted being pulled closer to rest his weight against his brother.  But then Thor started rubbing his back with one hand and with the other combing through his hair, murmuring, “I’m here, brother, I’m here, let it out.”  He did not say _“It’s all right,”_ because that would not have been true, and he wanted them to start over on a footing of honesty.

Loki seemed to relax in spite of himself, slowly letting his body slump against Thor’s, at last wrapping his arms loosely around Thor’s waist.  Thor had almost forgotten that they were nearly of a height, and it would actually be quite awkward for Loki to rest his head on Thor’s shoulder; he had still been imagining them as children, before the growth spurt that had seen Loki overtake Thor in height for a time, before Loki had stopped letting others see him cry.  Instead Loki’s tears fell warm into his hair, and against his neck he felt the wetness of the tears that already streaked Loki’s face (and probably also some snot and saliva, though Thor honestly didn’t care about that).

“I’m here, Loki,” he continued to murmur soothingly.  “I understand; truly I do.”

At that Loki raised his head and pulled away sharply to dash the tears from his face.  “Do you?”  His tone of contempt had returned in an instant.  “And I have not even told you what came of me after I fell.  What profound intuition you have gained, since your harrowing three-day ordeal!”

Thor ignored the jab and tried his best to mollify him.  “Of course I do not yet understand everything,” he said gently.  “Perhaps I never will.  But I understand why you are angry with Father.”  Loki gave a skeptical _hmph,_ but Thor pressed on doggedly: “And I beg you to _talk_ to him.  Tell him what you have just told me.  Tell him what happened to you in the Void.”  He cupped his hand around the side of Loki’s face, deliberately met his eyes, swiped at a stray tear with his thumb.  “Tell _me,_ as you promised you would, when you were ready.”

Loki lowered his eyes a little, looking discomfited.  “Yes, well… I suppose I must, if I am to tell you what I know of the Infinity Stones.”

“Those can wait,” Thor said softly.  “This cannot.”  He raised his other hand to Loki’s face and gently tilted it upward so that their eyes met again.  “May I… may I kiss you?”

Loki laughed, at once astonished, delighted, and faintly mocking. “You have not asked _permission_ since… well, I suppose you never did ask permission for that.”

Thor knew, and found himself regretting it; he was still haunted and disturbed by Loki’s earlier suggestion that Thor might ‘have his way’ with him by force.  “I am asking now,” he replied.

“So you are,” Loki said with a little head-shake.  He had clearly expected Thor to simply take what he wanted; being asked permission presented him with unforeseen difficulty.  “I never could deny you what you wanted, could I?” he mused, half to himself.  “I could have.  I wanted to.  Once I knew you wanted me as well, I wanted to hold myself back.”  His direct gaze was suddenly cold.  “I wanted you to know what it was like to want something you could never have.”

Thor lowered his hands from Loki’s face.  He was stung by this admission, but he could not say it surprised him.  He could still hear Loki asking him accusingly, _“When will you learn that you can’t always have everything you want?  You’ve never_ had _to learn it, have you?”_  Even more clearly he heard Loki’s bitter voice saying, _“It’s my fault.  I should never have…,”_ and felt the echoes of the pain at what he had not quite said.

“You did deny me,” he reminded Loki.  “Not at first, but later…”  Ten years before Thor’s failed coronation, when Loki had realized that they would no longer be able to hide what they were doing; and again only three days before the coronation, when he had rebuffed Thor’s shamefully drunken advances.

“And I could not keep to my resolution, could I?” Loki cut in, harsh with self-contempt.  “Once your coronation was no longer an obstacle, I fell back into your bed at the first opportunity.”  Thor recalled with a pang of guilt their hurried tryst after he had freed Loki from his cell in the dungeons and before they had left for Svartalfheim.  They had still been cruel to each other then, had left so much unsaid, so many questions unanswered; and then he had thought Loki lost to him forever, when they had had no time to set it right.

“There is no shame in it,” Thor assured him softly.  “I love you; I have always loved you.  I never stopped loving you, even when you no longer loved me.”

“And when was that?” Loki asked coldly, eyebrows raised.

“When you looked me in the eyes and then plunged a knife into my side,” Thor answered, unable to keep the resentment from his voice.  “When you dropped me from the sky in a steel and glass cage.  Or perhaps some time before that, when you sent the Destroyer to kill me, and burned a whole town in the attempt.”

Loki had begun shaking his head as Thor was speaking, while a furrow deepened in his brow.  “But you must understand,” he protested with painful earnestness; “I never stopped loving you, either.  I loved you all the while.  I loved you as I was hurting you, as I tried to kill you.”  His voice was beginning to crack again, and he squeezed his eyes shut to stop his tears from surging back; once the floodgates had opened, it was difficult to close them again.  “Don’t you see?” he asked hoarsely, still sounding as if on the edge of beginning again to weep.  “That is what my love earns you.  My love is poison.  You should not want such a thing.”

Thor felt that strange swelling in his chest again.  It was not anger this time, but it seemed a roiling storm of everything else: joy and sorrow, pain and relief, puzzlement and understanding.  He wondered if this was what it was like to feel as if one’s heart might burst.  “Perhaps I should not,” he acknowledged, his voice cracking under the strain of keeping it level.  “But I do.  Oh, how I do.”

The words he had uttered put him in mind of the wedding vows spoken in the part of Midgard where he had lived for a time.  He wondered if Loki had the same association, because he reached a hand around the back of Thor’s head, knotting his fingers in his hair, and pulled him forward for a kiss of almost bruising force.  A distant part of Thor’s mind reflected idly that he supposed this was Loki giving permission.

Once more he wrapped his arms around his brother and held him as tightly as he dared, blessing the Norns and whatever higher gods there might be that the time before—when he had cradled Loki’s lifeless body, for just a few moments, in the face of the coming storm and the end of all the worlds—was not the last.  Now Loki was warm and welcoming and unmistakably alive, his frantic fingers tugging at Thor’s hair with a strength that, in falling just short of pain, yielded an electrifying pleasure.  With his left hand he was worrying at the clasp that held Thor’s cloak to his shoulder.  Thor wasn’t sure what he was doing until he disentangled his right hand from Thor’s hair and, without breaking the kiss, applied both hands to fumbling at the clasp until it came unfastened, leaving Thor’s cape hanging heavily from his left shoulder.

Thor caught Loki’s hands in his own to stop him from attempting to remove any more clothing.  “What are we going to do, make love here on Father’s throne?” he asked dryly.

“Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it,” Loki retorted with a wicked smile.

“Of course I’ve thought about it,” Thor allowed, caught somewhere between mischievous complicity and genuine embarrassment.  “But… not while it is still Father’s.  Let us wait until it belongs to one of us by right.”  Loki opened his mouth, probably to protest, so Thor cut him off, dropping one of Loki’s hands to point a cautionary finger at him: “And don’t try to tell me that you hold it rightfully even now.  You still rule in Father’s name—wearing his face, even.”

But Loki had fixed on something else. “‘One of us’?” he echoed.  Thor could not tell whether it was incredulity or hope that lifted his voice.

“I gave up my claim to the throne,” Thor pointed out.  “You heard me do it; you accepted my abdication.  Father might still insist that it was not legitimately done, since it was not the rightful king who acknowledged it… we shall see.”  He cleared his throat uncomfortably while he steeled himself to raise the other relevant matter.  “Your legal status is also still… unclear.”

Loki pulled his hand away from Thor’s grip; the expression on his face had grown cool.  “Does the king’s surrender of his throne to me not constitute a pardon?”

Thor hedged.  “Since it was done secretly, and members of the Council will no doubt try to argue that Father was not in his right mind when he did it…”

“You would let them throw me back in the dungeon for the rest of my life?”  Loki hurled the accusation like a blade of ice to Thor’s chest.  “I would sooner have you kill me.”

“Never,” Thor promised him fervently.  “I will help you escape if I must.”  Loki’s expression relaxed.  Lest he become too confident of his place in Thor’s good graces, he felt the need to add sternly: “But you still must help me find Father.  I will hold you to that.”

Loki looked skeptical.  “Under threat of… what?”

“Never forgiving you for what you have done,” Thor replied with complete sincerity.  “For lying to me.  For letting me mourn needlessly for so long.”

All traces of irony left Loki’s face, and his voice was soft when he said, “A steep price indeed.”

“It is well that you find it so,” Thor remarked with wry regret, “or I would have no way to hold you.”

“Our common fight now holds me to you,” Loki reminded him darkly; “a common enemy.”

“Let us not speak of it now,” Thor urged, putting a gentle finger to Loki’s lips.  “I have you back, against all odds, beyond all hope.  I would enjoy that without the shadow of future battles hanging over us.”

Loki caught Thor’s wrist to pull his hand away from his mouth.  “You would enjoy _me,_ you mean,” he said, the wicked smile gradually returning to his face.

“I should hope that the enjoyment would be mutual,” Thor replied, using the hand in Loki’s grip to pull his brother toward him for another kiss.  It started light and teasing, with Loki periodically pulling back just a touch to let Thor chase his lips with tongue and teeth; but once Loki had allowed himself to be caught, the kiss grew deep and hungry, and their roving hands grew impatient.

Loki took a step backward to reestablish control.  “So, not on the throne,” he said firmly.  “Probably not in the King’s bedchamber, either, though that is where I have been sleeping lately…”

“Definitely not,” Thor confirmed; he still could not think of it as anything other than their parents’ room.  “Why not go to my rooms, as we always have?”

“The King would have no reason to visit his son’s rooms after they had just been speaking in the audience chamber,” Loki pointed out.  “So I will have to be seen retiring to my own rooms—that is, the King’s—and then I will follow you while invisible.  Leave the door ajar; I would not want to cause a stir if someone should accidentally hear a phantom knock, or see the door open for and close behind no one.”

“Just so,” Thor agreed; Loki was much better than he at contingency planning while aroused.

“Go,” Loki urged him.  “I would not want to cool your ardor by redonning the glamor while you are still watching.  Oh, and fix your cloak,” he added with a smirk.

Even the thought of Loki wearing their father’s form was enough to cool Thor’s ardor temporarily—which was just as well, if he was to make it to another wing of the palace without drawing excessive attention.  He turned around to refasten the clasp that Loki had managed to undo and strode back toward the doors of the throne room, his step lighter than it had been in at least four years.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case you were wondering about my description of "the strange black leather and weathered-metal armor—part Asgardian, part Xandarian, and part Kree—of a homeless mercenary from everywhere and nowhere," see my Loki-in-the-Void fic, [The Abyss Gazes Also](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5236796/chapters/17108125), for an account of how he got his sweet outfit upgrade (that's actually kind of why I started writing that fic in the first place...). Because all (but one) of my fics take place in the same timeline/universe, that fic will also be furnishing the details of what happened to Loki in the year between _Thor_ and _The Avengers_ , his encounter with Thanos, etc., coming in the next chapter.


	2. Truth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 4000 words of talking, 300 words of sex, 3300 more words of talking, 1400 words of sex interspersed with more talking.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The account of what happened to Loki between _Thor_ and _The Avengers_ is drawn from my fic [The Abyss Gazes Also](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5236796/chapters/17108125), but I tried to make it so that you DO NOT have to have read it to understand what's going on in this fic. I just hope that Loki's explanations of things aren't too long, wordy, boring, or confusing to those who haven't read my other fic...
> 
> This chapter does make a number of references to earlier installments in my Thorki series, especially its immediate predecessor [Fraternizing with the Enemy](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6819373) and (to a lesser extent) the one before that, [Winter, Autumn, and Spring](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7779421/chapters/17745055), so it would probably make more sense if read after those. Sorry-not sorry for the Nietzsche quotes; it's kind of what my version of Loki does. (This is what happens when you write fanfiction to procrastinate on your dissertation about Nietzsche.)

Thor’s old rooms, he found, had been kept clean and well-appointed for him in his absence.  Was that Loki’s doing, he wondered?  Indeed, once he reached his rooms and sat on the edge of his bed, alone, he began to wonder whether he had dreamed or imagined the whole thing.  Perhaps his visit to the Norns’ pool had driven him mad, after all.  But his lips still tingled lightly, and still felt a bit swollen, and a taste that had only ever belonged to Loki lingered on his tongue.  Could he be imagining those things as well?

And even if all that he remembered _had_ just taken place, why was he trusting Loki not to do him harm?  How did he know that Loki would not slip through the open door unseen and murder him before any guards could come to his aid?  Or, in Odin’s guise, tell the soldiers at his command that Thor plotted treason and bid them cast him into the dungeons, or even slay him where he stood?

Suddenly uneasy, Thor called Mjölnir to his hand, stood up from the bed, and went into the antechamber to wait in the shadows behind the slightly open door.  He felt intensely foolish.  If Loki truly meant him harm, would this meager preparation do him any good?  And if Loki’s intentions were as he had professed… what would he look like, lurking behind the door with Mjölnir at the ready?  He started back toward the bedroom, driven by a fresh determination to trust his brother.  But then Loki’s contemptuous drawl echoed in his head: _“Are you ever_ not _going to fall for that?”_

Thor was pacing back toward the antechamber just as Loki slipped in, returned to visibility once he was behind the door, and started to push it closed.  He froze when he saw Thor coming toward him with Mjölnir in his hand and a frown darkening his face, and the playful smile that had been hovering about his lips when he entered turned uncertain.

“And what have I done in the past quarter hour to make you change your mind about trusting me?”  He was trying for levity, but Thor could sense the fear in his voice and tense posture.

At once Thor’s face burned with shame, and he immediately set Mjölnir down.  “Nothing,” he said hurriedly.  “It’s only… it’s been a very strange day.”

“Yes, I imagine it has,” Loki said.  His smile was still tense.  “And I suppose I hardly have the right to be offended, considering… well, everything.”  The words were plainly belied by the hurt in his eyes.

“Nonetheless, I am sorry.”

“Don’t be.  You know what they say about trust.  Takes only an instant to break, but to rebuild, et cetera.”  He trailed off with an affectedly nonchalant wave of his hand.

“Both of us must work to rebuild the other’s trust,” Thor said gently.

Surprise flashed in Loki’s eyes, but he hastily covered it with mischief.  “You know I trust you more when you’re naked, so get about it.  And yes, I’m sure it’s more romantic when we undress each other, but your armor is too damned complicated.”

Thor knew better than to ask why Loki couldn’t just use magic to remove their clothes.  He had asked early in their years as lovers, the first time they had rendezvoused after some official event that required Thor to wear his full ceremonial armor, and Loki had given up after fiddling a bit with all the clasps and the tight-fitting mail sleeves.  At Thor’s question, Loki had given him a long-suffering look and said, “I _could_ use magic, but it would be a great deal more bother than just taking it off the normal way.”

So Thor began the rather long process of removing his armor: cape first, then sleeves, then breastplate, all laid neatly on a chair across the room from the bed.  Loki was watching him intently, and Thor returned his gaze when Loki began removing his own armor as well.  It resembled the light armor he used to wear in Asgard, Thor noticed, but it was more elaborate, the coat longer and sleeker, with golden pauldrons of elegant Kree design, curiously adorned around the edges with little metal teeth whose function Thor could not discern.

“I never had a chance to tell you: the new armor is lovely,” Thor remarked.

Loki’s eyebrows shot up.  “Er… thank you?”

“Truly,” Thor insisted, since Loki clearly suspected mockery.  “I’d be curious to know the story of how you acquired it.”

Loki laughed as he pulled his tunic off over his head and let it fall to the floor beside his coat.  “It’s a longish and not very interesting story.”

“Well, whenever you’re of a mind to tell it, I’m of a mind to listen.”

“And won’t that be a novelty,” Loki scoffed.

Thor knew he deserved that.  “I promise, from now on, I will listen,” Thor said, squarely meeting his brother’s eyes.  “To your story, your advice, your concerns, your grievances… everything.  Even to your invective, if you need it.”

“Don’t tempt me,” Loki warned, trying uneasily to deflect this sudden sincerity with humor.

Thor persisted; this was too important to let Loki put him off.  “But you must speak if I am to listen.”

“And you must listen if I am to speak,” Loki retorted icily.  “Why do you think I stopped telling you when anything was wrong?”

“I am sorry,” Thor said again.  “I do know that I must bear some of the blame for all that has come between us.”

“‘Some,’” Loki muttered, bending to pull off his boots.

“Let us not quarrel over how much blame falls to whom,” Thor cajoled him.  He stepped forward and, when Loki stood straight again, slipped his hands beneath the lightweight green shirt Loki wore under his armor to caress his stomach, taut and smooth with lean muscle.  Loki shuddered slightly at his touch, but obediently raised his arms when Thor tugged the shirt upward to pull it off.

Thor’s fingers found the knife scar on Loki’s lower abdomen that he had stumbled across the last time they had been together.  “Tell me,” he said softly.

“Oh,” said Loki, looking down.  “I was stabbed,” he said unhelpfully.

“Yes, so I surmised.  But by whom, and why?”

Loki shrugged.  “I don’t know who it was.  Some paid assassin.  I paid him back in kind… which ended far worse for him, since Xandarian flesh gives more easily than Aesir, or Jötun.  But I never caught the bastard who gave me this one,” he said, moving Thor’s hand to trace another scar between two ribs on his right side.  “Lucky my heart isn’t in the same place as a Xandarian’s…”

“Why would someone pay Xandarian assassins to kill you?” Thor asked, now thoroughly confused.

“I, ah… I made some enemies in my line of work.  Inevitably, since that work involved stealing, smuggling, and selling high-value items, many of questionable legality.  Piracy, in a word.  It’s a crowded market, you know.”

“On Xandar?”

“Yes, well, the Bifröst—or what remained of it—deposited me on an outpost of the Nova Empire, so that’s where I ended up plying my trade.  Or the Andromeda Galaxy, more broadly.”

“So that’s how you got the Kree armor.”  Thor was no intergalactic historian, but he did know arms and armor, and he recognized the ancient designs on Loki’s pauldron, baldric, and vambraces; armor from that era was rare, well-made, and highly sought after.

“I only found the one pauldron, which wouldn’t sell very well without the rest.  And besides, I liked the way it looked, so I kept it.”

“So the other pieces with the Kree designs…”

“Just engraved to match, I’m afraid.  But enough about that.  I’m more naked than you are, in more ways than one; this must be remedied.”

While Loki started unlacing Thor’s tunic (which was familiar and simple enough), Thor said, “If there are any truths you would ask of me, I will gladly give them.”

Loki did not look up from the work of his hands.  He was still pulling Thor’s tunic over his head when he asked, with studied nonchalance, “Why did you not come to see me for a year after I was imprisoned?”

It became clear to Thor that talk of the ‘pang’ of guilt was not merely metaphorical, because he felt it as a sudden ache in his stomach.  “I was angry,” he said simply.  “And hurt, and confused.  But I was too cowardly to ask the questions that ate at me, because I feared what the answers might be.  It was… easier to nurse my anger at a distance.  To tell myself that I had given you up for lost, when in truth I kept myself in just enough ignorance to keep a spark of hope alive.”

Loki laughed, with far less bitterness than Thor might have expected.  “Do you know, that reminds me of this strange theory Midgardians have about ‘subatomic particles’—very small components of matter.  They say that the position of these particles is not only unknown but _indeterminate_ until a measurement is taken.  A skeptic of this view devised a thought experiment that he took to be a _reductio ad absurdum:_ suppose a cat is put in a box with a flask of poison, and a certain motion of one of these particles will trigger a mechanism to break the flask.  If the position of the particle is truly indeterminate until measured, then until we open the box, the cat is both alive and dead—but that cannot be.  Just so, it seems, you thought that I was at once lost to you and not, in reach of salvation and not, so long as you never spoke to me to find out which it was.”

Thor frowned.  “And yet it is not so strange to think that the state of a person’s mind is unfixed until asked after as to think that a cat may be both alive and dead until seen to be one or the other.  I feared that if, in anger, I spoke the wrong words to you, I would ensure that I had lost you forever.”

“But you did not fear that you might ensure it by waiting too long to ask?” Loki said, more gently than the words might have warranted.

Thor pressed his fingers to his closed eyelids and sighed.  “I did.  I did, but I was a coward.  I kept telling myself that it had not been too long yet; that if you were still my brother, a few months would not be enough to change that.  I could not bear to let go of either my anger or my hope.”

Loki laughed again, slightly taunting, but still remarkably benign.  “If only I had recorded it for the ages—the mighty Thor admitting to cowardice!  But come, you are still wearing too much clothing.”  He tugged at the hem of Thor’s undershirt to indicate that he should take his hands away from his face so that it could be removed.

“I am sorry for waiting so long,” Thor said once the shirt was off.

“I am sorry, too,” Loki all but whispered, running his fingers lightly over the scar he had left just below Thor’s ribs on his left side.

“I wish I could do it over,” Thor confessed.

Loki’s laugh was sharper and more derisive, but still good-humored.  “Ah, but where would you start?”

Thor blinked.  “I meant only the last time we were together… the first time I saw you after we fought in Midgard.  The other question… I could not answer.  Could you?”

Loki took Thor’s hand and began leading him toward the bed.  “Sometimes I think I would start over from the moment of my birth.  I would make sure I froze or starved to death before Odin ever found me.”

“Loki, please don’t…” Thor began, his brow knitted in distress.

“But not often,” Loki quickly reassured him.  “Most often… well, I probably would not have let Frost Giants into Asgard.  But for the rest… can one follow the thread to find where the skein first became tangled?  There are far too many strands, too many places where they meet and intertwine.”

“You sound like Mother,” Thor said softly, raising a hand to stroke Loki’s cheek and card his fingers through his hair, as he remembered sitting at Frigga’s feet as a child, carding the cloud-soft silvery wool that she would spin into yarn for her weaving.

“I watched her often enough at her loom,” Loki said, then cleared his throat when his voice began to waver.  “She taught me that working seiðr was like weaving a tapestry.  She said the same of time and destiny.  If I had learned her lessons better, I would have known it could not be so easy for one strand to change the pattern of the whole; that instead I could only mar it.”

“But surely it is not impossible for a single person to change history,” Thor remonstrated.

“Working _with_ the broader patterns, yes,” Loki agreed, putting his hand over Thor’s and continuing to walk backwards toward the bed, pulling Thor along with him, until his legs hit the edge of it.  Then he sat and swung his long legs up onto the bed, his arch expression indicating his awareness of the grace of the motion and how it showed his body to best advantage, and reclined regally on the pillows.

“So, you no longer wish that we had never begun this?” Thor asked, hesitant, hopeful, his hand still clutching his brother’s.

Loki smiled indulgently.  “No more often than I wish I had died on the ice as a child.  Sometimes I think the one was as far from my power as the other.”

With far less grace than his brother, Thor climbed onto the bed to cover Loki’s body with his and shower his face with kisses.  Between the kisses that found his lips, Loki said laughingly, “I think it is enough for us to do one night over again—or one afternoon, I suppose it was.”

“I want there to be no secrets between us this time, no dishonesty, no cruelty,” Thor said firmly as he stroked Loki’s hair back from his face.

“What a pity,” Loki said, lowering his eyelashes and adopting a husky voice in a show of seductiveness belied only by the playful quirk of his mouth.  “And here I had been rather hoping you would use me cruelly.”

Thor flinched and sat back on his heels, pulling his hand away from Loki’s face.  “Loki, I don’t understand this… this desire for me to—to hurt you.  I don’t…”

“Don’t worry about it,” Loki interrupted airily.

“How can I not worry about it?  It frightens me.”

Loki seemed surprised by this response.  “Why should it?  Should it frighten you that the wicked man knows he is wicked and desires to be punished for it?”

“Not like this, Loki, never like this,” Thor told him fervently, putting a comforting hand to his face again.  “You have lost your way, to be sure, but I will not believe that you _are_ wicked, irrevocably, or that you cannot find your way again.”

“Ah, but what would be the point of punishment if being wicked were an irrevocable part of me, and not something that could be trained out of me—or at the very least, something I _could have_ chosen not to do?”

Thor shook his head helplessly, then placed his fingers gently over Loki’s mouth.  Loki shuddered unexpectedly at his touch.  “Please, Loki, not now.  I cannot bear to speak of philosophy now.  It is… too cold, too unreal, and you are neither.”

“Very well,” Loki said genially once Thor had removed his hand.  “No philosophy.  What shall I speak of instead?”

“Tell me what you want,” Thor rumbled, running his thumb over Loki’s lower lip.

Loki slouched down on the pillows, letting his hair fan out wantonly behind him, and with a lascivious grin he answered, “I want you to fuck me.”

“You’re sure it’s all right?” Thor asked him gently.  “Last time, you…”

“Yes, it’s fine,” Loki said, sounding faintly irritable.  “I wouldn’t ask you if it weren’t.”

Thor threw him a skeptical look, thinking of other things he had been asking for lately.  “Last time, you pushed me away, and said you had had a bad experience that made you wary of it,” Thor finished rather pointedly.  “Will you tell me what happened?”

“Yes, if you’ll take off your trousers and get on with it,” Loki sighed.

Thor obediently started unlacing his trousers and tugging them off, and Loki did the same while he spoke.  “In the course of my piratical career, I sometimes found that the easiest way to get information as to the whereabouts of certain high-value items, or even access to the items themselves, was to seduce their past or present owners.”

Thor paused with his trousers halfway down his legs.  “But you don’t—you never—”

“No, indeed, I had never slept with anyone but you, nor had I any desire to.  But sometimes we must perform unpleasant tasks to achieve our larger aims, is it not so?”

“This is… different,” Thor choked out, still shocked.

“Yes, you would say that, wouldn’t you?” Loki mused.  “Be assured that I thought of you every time this task arose, or else certain prerequisites of the task would not have… arisen.  Well, you or Nietzsche,” Loki amended with a teasing grin.  “His words, that is; not him personally.  On the virtues of the philosopher, for instance: ‘the bold, light, delicate gait of his thoughts…, the loftiness of masterly glances and glances  _down_ , the feeling of separation from the crowd and its duties and virtues…, the pleasure and exercise of the great justice, the art of command, the width of the will, the slow eye that rarely admires, rarely looks up, rarely loves…’  But I was not to speak of philosophy, was I?”

“You were to tell me what happened to you,” Thor reminded him gently.  “Why you did not want me to enter you, last time.”

“Ah, yes.  One of the people I seduced for the purpose of stealing from him was… not a generous lover.  He rushed into things before I was quite… prepared for him.  And while I gather that the taste for slapping and choking in sexual play is not uncommon, I did not think it was usually quite so forceful.  Or unexpected.”

Thor’s shock was exceeded only by the rage that flared in his belly.  “I trust you killed the Xandarian scum with your bare hands,” he said through gritted teeth.

“He was not Xandarian,” Loki said carefully, “but of a stronger, longer-lived race.  Nor could I have killed him and expected my theft to go undetected as long as it did.”

“Were you… were you hurt?” Thor asked, dreading the answer.

Loki gave a noncommittal shrug.  “Nothing that could not be repaired with a basic healing spell, once I had left.”

“And you did not avenge yourself upon him… because you did not want your _theft_ to be detected?”

“Unpleasant tasks for larger aims, remember,” Loki said with a chilly smile.  “I had a reputation to build.  And build it I did, in a matter of mere months.  I was the best.  ‘The Pirate King,’ that was one of the names they had for me, and ‘the Magician.’  I could do impossible things—and I did.  Not all of the impossible things imputed to me in legend, however…”

“It was worth it, then?” Thor asked him with quiet incredulity.

“All of it,” Loki answered, almost defiantly.  “Were not your honor and glory as a warrior worth all the wounds you suffered in battle?”

“Of course, but…”

“Of course but what?” Loki snapped.  “But my ambitions were not _honorable_ enough?  Being a skilled criminal is nothing like being a warrior?  Murdering secretly in dark alleys is nothing like murdering openly on a field?  Stealing by wit and subterfuge is nothing like claiming spoils from the vanquished enemy?  I’m so _dreadfully_ sorry that the abyss I cast myself into spat me out in a part of the universe where war is no longer pursued for glory and recreation.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“No, I certainly hope you didn’t.  Now, will you _please_ get on with it?”

Thor still felt uncertain, knowing what Loki had endured.  “It has been long enough now that it no longer troubles you?”

“Not enough to dissuade me, in any case.  In truth I wished to do our last time over, as well: it did not feel right, the way we did it.  It was very pleasant, of course,” he said hurriedly as Thor opened his mouth to object, “but not our reunion as it should have been.  Not _us_ as we should be.”

“I don’t like or understand this, either,” Thor said, frowning.  “This idea that you should… submit to me in some way.”

“Isn’t that what it means for me to ‘know my place’?” Loki rejoined.  It was presented as a wry jest, but the cutting edge to the words betrayed the profound hurt and resentment beneath them.

Thor had to cast his mind back—could he truly have said that, told Loki to ‘know his place’?—but after a moment he recalled, with a hot flush of shame, their confrontation with Laufey in Jötunheim, when Loki had tried to caution him and Thor had thoughtlessly, arrogantly pushed him aside.  He could try to justify it; he could say that Loki had weakened their position by revealing dissension within the party, by challenging the authority of the rightful leader.  But he knew better than that now; knew that he had acted and spoken rashly, without seeking the advice of the companions whose lives he was risking, and that Loki’s aim—saving all their lives—was far more important than Thor’s saving face.

“Your place is at my right hand, giving me your wise and shrewd counsel,” Thor affirmed, with all the weight of a warrior’s oath behind it.  “Or else it is on the throne behind me, directing the strength of my arm.  Who takes what part when we lie together comes into it not at all.”

Loki stared at him in open-mouthed shock for a moment.  When his jaw was capable of movement again, he said, “You truly mean it, then.  You would yield the throne to me.”

“If you want it, and the laws of the Realm permit it, then yes.”  In truth, Thor felt it as a relief.  Loki had shown himself to be a competent ruler in Odin’s absence, in spite of his earlier lapses; and throughout their youth, he had always been the superior strategist.

“Ah, but do I want it?” Loki asked himself aloud.  “There’s the rub.”

Thor was puzzled.  “Don’t you?  Since you have taken it for yourself…”

“Another matter that we must put off for later,” Loki said briskly.  “For now, though—you asked me what I want, and I have told you: I want you to fuck me.  That is what I have always imagined when I thought of us together, since before I dared to dream that it might ever be a reality, and for all the years we have been apart.  If, as you say, that has nothing to do with who submits to whom, then it should not trouble you.  Now, where’s that salve we used to use…?”

He leaned over toward Thor’s bedside table; nothing was on the surface but a Midgardian novel and an empty water glass, so he opened the drawer and found the small jar he was seeking.  “Are you going to do this or shall I?” he asked as he twisted off the lid.

“I imagine us both ways,” Thor said stubbornly.  “I want you surrounding me, and I want you within me.”

“I _have_ become very well acquainted with my own fingers in the past few years,” Loki remarked as he took up some of the salve and reached under his leg for his opening.

Thor relented.  He gently moved Loki’s hand away, then reached for the jar himself, coated his fingers, and slipped one inside.  Loki closed his eyes and sighed as if a great tension had just been released.  Thor watched Loki’s face as he opened him, drinking in every twitch of muscle in his lips and his brow, every uneven breath and slight gasp or sigh, the play of slight discomfort and greater pleasure.  _I love you,_ he wanted to say.  He didn’t; their conversation had ranged over enough heavily fraught subjects as it was, and to speak of love again would only weight it even more heavily.

When he deemed his work finished, Thor slicked up both of their cocks, lined himself up, and pressed in.  He and Loki groaned in unison.  It did feel like coming home.  He stayed still for a few moments—waiting for Loki to tell him he was ready for him to move, yes, but also simply feeling their union, letting his body tell his still-doubting mind that Loki was alive, and here with him, and still his brother after all.

“Well?” Loki prompted him at last.  So Thor started moving, never letting his eyes leave his brother’s face.  _I love you,_ he thought with each thrust.  Loki returned his gaze, his lips slightly parted in silent praise.  After a time, Thor could no longer bear to look at those inviting lips without kissing them, so he leaned down, driving his thrusts deeper as Loki wrapped his legs around his waist and sighed out his pleasure into Thor’s mouth.

Thor loved to be able to look on Loki’s face or to kiss him as they fucked, but he also wanted to feel more of their bodies pressed together; he wanted everything.  He pulled out and Loki made a confused, unhappy sound before Thor said “Turn around, would you?”

A guarded expression came over Loki’s face.  “Why?” he asked cautiously.

 “I want to be closer.  To be able to go deeper.”  Thor’s voice came out huskier than he had anticipated.

Loki’s eyes were mistrustful.  “I don’t want your pity,” he warned.

They had not spoken yet of the scars whose discovery had disrupted their lovemaking the last time, whose existence was like another presence in the room between them.  “I don’t want to give you my pity,” Thor replied.  “Only my understanding.”

Loki did as he was bid and turned around, slowly, to kneel in front of Thor with his back turned to him.  Thor was careful not to hiss out his dismay at the tangle of intersecting scars—some thin and white and only slightly raised; some thicker, puckered and pink like the knife scars—that told plainly of the use of a whip, most likely a blade-tipped one.  Thor only traced the scars silently, with gentle fingers.

“What happened?” he asked, keeping his voice merely curious.  “Were you caught in the course of your… piratical activities?”

“Heavens, no,” Loki said with a slight laugh.  “I mean, yes, I was, twice; but that’s not how I acquired these.  Even the Kree no longer flog criminals—not for smuggling, at any rate.”

“Then who did this?” Thor asked quietly.  Concerned, indignant on Loki’s behalf, but not pitying.

Loki sighed and gave Thor a pleading look over his shoulder.  “Can’t this wait?  I thought you wished to enjoy our reunion before we spoke of battles yet to come.”

Thor shook his head.  “One of my greatest regrets about last time was that I saw this”—Loki shivered as Thor ran light fingers again over the tracery of scars—“saw all the hurts your body had suffered, but did not know the stories behind them.  I knew your body without truly knowing _you._ I do not wish to repeat that mistake.”

“Very well,” Loki said heavily, and turned back around to lean against the pillows facing Thor.  “You might as well make yourself comfortable, because the telling will likely take a while.”

Thor could predict that kneeling on the bed with his legs folded under him would quickly become uncomfortable, so he moved to join Loki in sitting against the pillows.  “Who gave you those scars?” he asked again, ever gentle.

“The one who seeks the Infinity Stones,” Loki answered cautiously.

“Tell me his name, so that I may kill him for you,” Thor offered, almost cheerfully.

“No, you certainly may not,” Loki said sharply, shooting a glare at Thor, “for I have sworn to kill him myself.  But you are permitted to assist me, so I will tell you his name anyway.  You have heard of Thanos, called ‘the Mad Titan’?”

“I had thought he was only a legend, or else long dead,” Thor remarked, startled.

Loki laughed darkly.  “Legend he may be, but he is assuredly not dead—because he cannot die.”

“ _Cannot_?”

“He courts the Lady Death, but she has spurned him, and forbidden him to enter her realm.  He hopes to win her by presenting her with the Infinity Gauntlet, completed by all six Infinity Stones in its settings.”

“What in Ymir’s name would Death want with the Infinity Gauntlet?”

“Precisely what I asked myself when I first discovered his purpose—entirely by accident.  I can hardly believe it took me so long to figure it out.  Thor, it is not the Infinity Stones he means to offer the Lady Death; it is all the worlds.”

“Offer her…?”  Loki met his eyes solemnly as realization dawned in them, followed immediately by horror.  “He means to destroy all the worlds.  To bring them all into Death’s dominion.”

Loki laughed again, mirthless and sardonic.  “You were right to want to put this conversation off until after we had, er, renewed our acquaintance,” he remarked, noting the rapidly waning urgency of their desire.

It suddenly felt immensely foolish to Thor that they were naked, that only moments ago they had been consummating their reunion.  As he put it all together in his mind, his horror only grew.  “So it was at his behest that you went to Midgard to seek the Tesseract.”

“Yes.  And he wished me to establish my rule over Earth so that my possession of the Tesseract would be secure and unchallenged—as well as to distract Odin’s attention from anything else Thanos might have been doing…”

“And he… he tortured you.”  It came out as a hoarse whisper.

Loki tilted his head to one side, as if considering it.  “Yes, I suppose you might say that.  He would call it ‘punishment’—for disobeying him, for withholding information that he wanted…”

“Information?  What sort of information?” Thor asked, alarmed.

“Oh, anything and everything.  My knowledge of Midgard, of course.  Information about me, about my… our family, about my fighting capabilities, my training as a warrior.  About Asgard… and Jötunheim.”

“What did you tell him?”  Thor feared what Thanos might know about Asgard’s defenses, but also knew well the strength of will that would have enabled Loki to remain silent under duress.

“‘Tell him’?” Loki echoed with mordant amusement.  “I suppose that depends on what you mean by ‘tell.’  You will recall that I came to Midgard armed with a scepter that contained the Mind Stone.  I received it from Thanos, of course…”

Thor’s mind was racing well ahead of Loki’s words, and a sudden new horror broke over him, combined with a perverse hope.  “Were you—did he control your will, as you controlled Barton and Selvig?”

Loki drew back and gave him a look composed in varying degrees of scorn, indignation, and incredulity.  “Certainly not!  Nor could he have, even if he had tried.  That only works on the weaker mortal races.  Nonetheless, he could still use the Mind Stone to draw memories and knowledge from my mind, as well as to convey knowledge to me.  And to send… negative reinforcement if I tried to break the connection between us.”

“Norns, Loki, I… I didn’t…”  Thor’s words failed him.  He cleared his throat, blinked away the prickle of tears—show no pity, he scolded himself—and tried again.  “Then he… he forced you to invade Midgard to capture it and the Tesseract, under threat of torture?”

Loki’s irritated frown bordered on anger.  “You’re doing it again—trying to find some _excuse_ for me, to tell yourself that it wasn’t my fault, it wasn’t really _me_ that wanted to fight you, to hurt you.  I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Thor, but it’s not that simple.  He could use the Mind Stone to channel his own thoughts into my mind—not always intentionally.  But he could not use it to instill wholly new feelings or desires… or to construct false memories from whole cloth.”

Thor flinched.  He could hear Loki’s spite-filled voice biting out, _“I remember a shadow—living in the shade of your greatness.  I remember you tossing me into an abyss—I who was and should be king.”_ “So you… that truly is how you remembered it?  That you were… always living in my shadow?”  He paused, trying to reconcile Loki’s bitter accusations in Midgard with what he had said earlier in their conversation.  “But… you know it was not I who cast you into the abyss.  You yourself said…”  He trailed off, now well and truly confused.

It seemed to Thor that there was pity in Loki’s gaze upon _him,_ which hardly seemed fair.  “He could not implant new feelings or memories, so he had to work with what was already there.  He forced me to relive certain memories over and over, until my own mind—encouraged by the Mind Stone, whose baleful influence you know all too well—began to see them as he wanted me to.  Sometimes because they went unchallenged by other memories—memories of your respect and affection—that might have contradicted their testimony.  Sometimes… sometimes only to protect myself.  To protect my pride.”

Loki cleared his throat and glanced away, looking apologetic, even ashamed.  “Since then, though, I’ve had time to… to sort through it all.  To figure out what was real, and what was… distorted.  I think I have it mostly figured out, at any rate.  You’ll have to help me catch anything I’ve missed.”  He turned back toward Thor and flashed him a smile whose dark humor Thor could hardly fathom.

Thor found himself simply staring at Loki, still trying to comprehend the horror he had lived.  Loki began to look discomfited.  “Please say something,” he said, his smile grown tenuous.  “I have no idea what you’re thinking, and this is becoming awkward.”

“I—I hardly know how to blame you anymore for what you did,” Thor said clumsily.  His tongue felt thick and numb.

Seemingly out of nowhere, anger darkened Loki’s face again, and his whole body tensed and trembled.  “No, don’t—you’re _pitying_ me again, I know you are.”  As if he could no longer contain the nervous energy that hummed through him, Loki abruptly stood up from the bed.  “I won’t have you think of me as some—helpless victim,” he hissed, fists clenched.  He began to pace irregularly, in short aimless paths, as if trying to find a way out of some invisible cage.

“I acted neither unwittingly nor unwillingly,” he declared, the words hard and sharp.  “I was not his mindless thrall, nor did I do it all merely for fear of painful reprisal—though Urðr knows that might have been motivation enough.  And perhaps it was not my idea to begin with, but by the time I did it—Norns help me—it seemed like a _good_ idea.  I _wanted_ to do it.  I _wanted_ to rule Midgard, to weld its warring nations into a single society that could stand on an equal footing with other Realms.  I wanted to taunt Odin by conquering a world of which he styled himself ‘protector,’ by holding it, and myself, just out of his reach.  I _wanted_ to hurt you, to humiliate you, as you had hurt and humiliated me all our lives.  Without meaning to, of course you’ll say, without knowing you did it!—but I could not think of that, then.  He held the hurt and humiliation before my eyes until I could see nothing else.”

Loki was beautiful in his anger: unselfconsciously naked, his shoulders held straight and proud even as he paced—no, prowled, lithe and fierce and restless as a caged panther, his whole long-limbed body held tense as if coiled to spring.  Thor rose and went to him, wanting to comfort him, yes, but also wanting desperately—and very inappropriately, at just this moment—to possess him again.

He took Loki into his arms once more, and once more Loki held himself stiff before gradually relaxing into the embrace.  “I cannot blame you, brother,” Thor reaffirmed.  “You were not yourself, not truly…”

“No, no, I _was_ myself, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you!” Loki insisted; frustration turned his cadence almost into a sob.  He pushed halfheartedly at Thor’s chest as if he felt he ought to make the effort to escape, but Thor held firm and Loki gave in quickly, curling his fingers to press his nails into Thor’s bare chest.  “He could not add anything to me that was not already there; he could not take anything away.  It was me, and only me, that did everything I did.”  Thor noticed that Loki seemed to avoid saying the Mad Titan’s name any more often than necessary; it was implicit in that ominous _he_ that they both understood.

“Maybe so,” Thor acknowledged, running his fingers soothingly through Loki’s hair, “but you were in dark, terrible, impossible circumstances.  I cannot say that I would have done any differently, had I been in your place.”

“Bullshit,” Loki said harshly.  To Thor, the crude Midgardian expression sounded strange and incongruous on his elegant, eloquent lips.  “You would have done as you always do.  You would have remained strong in the face of torment; no doubt you would have made a heroic escape.  You certainly would not have led an assault on Midgard.  There is no darkness in you that he could have turned to his purposes: no ambition to rule, no lust for power, no thirst for revenge.”

“You have far more confidence in my virtue than I have,” Thor said with gentle humor.  “I still doubt that I have the right to blame you—that I am _worthy_ to blame you—not knowing whether I could have resisted where you did not.”

Loki flexed his fingers spasmodically, digging his nails deeper into Thor’s chest, as if wishing for fabric that he could clutch at.  “I don’t want you to _justify_ me, to absolve me; I don’t want you to decide that it wasn’t my doing, wasn’t my fault, that I don’t deserve blame.  I want you to _forgive_ me.”

“I do, brother,” Thor said ardently, pulling him closer to murmur the words into his hair.  “I forgive you.”

“Not _now,_ you idiot,” Loki snapped, muffled against Thor’s neck.  “I haven’t even apologized properly, let alone made amends.  For Midgard, or for… later.  But I will.  Give me time.”

“Only give me your aid,” Thor said, drawing back to look seriously into Loki’s eyes, “and I will give you as much time as you need.”

Loki rolled his eyes.  “Yes, of course, we must find your father, who is in such _grave_ peril in Midgard.”

 _“Our_ father,” Thor corrected him—deliberately inverting Loki’s interjections—with a touch of asperity.

Loki only pursed his lips in response.  “As for the other task—in truth, it is more mine than yours.”

“His death is yours by right,” Thor agreed vehemently.  He found himself emulating Loki in avoiding speaking Thanos’s name; he wondered if some part of him credited the old tale that the Mad Titan’s attention could be drawn to wherever his name was spoken.

Loki shifted his gaze away, looking guilty.  “Not quite his death, and not only by right,” he said delicately.  Before Thor could formulate a question, Loki answered his puzzled look by explaining: “I made a promise to the Lady Death—called Hela, here in Asgard.  I promised that I would destroy him so completely that he would no longer exist even in her realm, so that he would at last leave her in peace.”

“…in exchange for returning you to life,” Thor filled in, with growing dread at the realization.

“Yes.  Ever since, I have been gathering as much information as I can about him, and about the Infinity Stones, to find out how I might destroy him.”

“And the reason you never told me you were alive…”

“…was partly that I did not wish to risk being thrown back into prison—and no, I had no reason to trust that you would not,” Loki said testily as a look of indignation came over Thor’s face and he drew a breath to protest.  “But I also wished to ensure that Thanos never found out I had survived.  In my guise as Odin, I let it be known as widely as I could that Loki had died, for good this time; that his body had been found and burned and he would not be coming back.”

“And you did not trust me to keep your secret?” Thor asked, letting just a hint of his hurt and anger creep into his voice.

Loki’s voice was apologetic as he said, “I could not afford to chance it.  If you had known… no doubt _this_ would have happened sooner.  And the more often you came to me, the greater the risk that I would be seen as I am, and that word of it would find its way to _him._ ”

“But you have seen fit to reveal yourself to me now…”

“…because now I need your help more than I need secrecy, and you have shown that you _can_ help me.”

Thor’s pride was stung, but he tried not to let it show too plainly.  “And you did not believe that until I came to you with the warning about the Infinity Stones?”

Loki frowned; he had perceived Thor’s aggrievement, and was unmoved by it.  “You know well that this is an enemy unlike any we have ever faced.  He is magically powerful, brilliant, subtle, and utterly ruthless.  I did not doubt your courage or good will, but your subtlety…”

Thor _hmph_ ed with exaggerated affront, and Loki laughed at him.  “It seems my absence has been good for you,” he teased; “you have learned to supply some of the subtlety for yourself.”

All the levity fled from Thor’s demeanor.  “Never say that.  Losing you… it almost destroyed me the first time; after the second time… I think it was only necessity that held me together.”

“Oh?  I thought your mortal paramour was _holding you together_ well enough,” Loki said, the acid in his voice leaching through his mask of unconcern.

Thor glared at him sternly, recalling how Loki had threatened Jane when he realized what Thor felt for her.  “Don’t, Loki.  You have no right to reproach me with her; when I met her, you had long since relinquished your claim.”

“ _I_ know that, but it did not stop _you_ from pawing at _me_ just days before you started mooning after her.”

“I am not proud of that,” Thor said quietly.

“Well, then, I’ll overlook your indiscretion if you’ll overlook a bit of pettiness.”

“Pettiness it is indeed,” Thor rebuked him without heat.  “She could never be what you are to me; do not pretend she is your rival.”

“Is she not?  Will you not go back to her, when you return to Midgard?”

“I will, but only to tell her that it is over,” Thor said softly.  “It will not surprise her; we have both known for some time that it was never really possible for us.”

“The way an affair with your own brother so clearly is possible?” Loki scoffed.

“We will find a way,” Thor vowed.  “I will demand that we rule side by side, as brothers and equals.  Even if we do take wives, who will question it if we are often closeted alone together, to discuss the sensitive affairs of the Realm?”

“Ever optimistic,” said Loki, shaking his head with condescending wonder.  “But there is no sense in worrying now about what we shall do in circumstances we may well not live to see.”

Thor regarded Loki, serious and silent, with furrowed brow.  “You fear that we will lose this fight.”

“Fear…?”  Loki’s laugh was high-pitched and humorless.  “We _cannot_ lose, Thor.  It truly would mean the end of everything; even Dark Elves could not thrive in the world as he would make it.  We cannot lose.  But will we survive what is required of us to win?”

“I find it matters little to me,” Thor said, smoothing Loki’s hair back with his fingers and leaving his palm to cup his cheek.  “For years I have not dreamed that I would ever know such great happiness as to die with you fighting at my side.”

“Frost Giants don’t go to Valhalla, Thor,” Loki said quietly, with both pity and poison in his voice.  “I know; I have been to Hel, and that after dying as heroic a death as one might wish for.”

“Then I will petition the Valkyries ceaselessly until they let you in,” Thor said, his face stormy with anger and determination.  “And if they will not, I will demand that they let me join you in Hel.”

Loki shook his head with a sad, fond smile.  “You won’t, but I don’t expect it of you.  And it warms me to know you thought you would,” he added, over the beginnings of Thor’s attempt at denial.

“We’ll make it a wager,” Thor said with a jaunty tone that even to him sounded somewhat false.  “If I do as I have promised, then you owe me a thousand kisses, either in Hel or in Valhalla.”

“If you do as you have promised,” Loki replied, his answering grin as false as Thor’s, “then I will pay the price gladly, and with interest.”

He leaned in to make a down payment, and they wrapped their arms around each other as they kissed again and again, light and teasing kisses alternating with slow, lazy kisses and fiercely demanding ones.  Thor began to think that he had set his wager too low; they might pass one thousand and scarcely notice, still starving for more.

“But for now, there’s something _you_ still owe _me_ ,” Loki purred breathlessly when they paused.  He pulled away from Thor and resumed his place on the bed, crouched with his ass raised temptingly in the air, his hole still slightly reddened and puffy from their earlier interrupted activities.

Thor knelt behind him and ran his hands over the perfect curves of Loki’s ass, to the little dimples just above it between his spine and his hips, and then up to the map of scars etched into the skin of his back.  Cutting through the knot of scars from the lash was a single vertical line right in the center, where the Kursed Dark Elf had thrust the bayonet through him; Thor had seen its mate in the center of Loki’s chest.  He ran his fingers down it, silently blessing the Goddess of Death for granting them this rebirth, and vowing that he would never begrudge her the cost she had placed on it, or whatever costs she might yet impose.  Then he spread his hands over Loki’s shoulders, imagining that the pattern of grooves and ridges spelled out words that he could read with his palms, telling the story of all Loki had suffered, and survived.

One last question, before Thor gave his brother what he wanted: “What was he ‘punishing’ you for, when he gave you these?”

Thor could hear the impatience in Loki’s voice, but he answered: “It was the first time he sought to draw information from me using the Mind Stone—before he had established the connection that allowed him to send pain directly into my mind.  I think he wanted to mark me as his own, indelibly, body as well as mind.”

“And what information did you try to withhold from him?”  Thor hoped that despite his (understandable) ambivalence toward Asgard, Loki had resisted rendering it vulnerable to the Mad Titan.

Loki stilled for a moment before answering in a quiet, hesitant voice, “He wanted to know about you.  He suspected you would be the one who came to Midgard to stop me.  He wanted anything he might use against you—weaknesses, yes, but also my own grievances and grudges.  Ways he could use _me_ against you.”

“And you refused him.”

“I tried,” Loki said, turning to give Thor a pained smile over his shoulder.

Thor felt the strange swelling feeling rising from his chest into his throat again.  “You suffered all this trying to protect me.”

Loki laughed nervously.  “And the big one in the middle—I got that one trying to protect you, too.  Maybe I should stop; it doesn’t seem to end well for me.”

Thor laughed as well, warmly.  Then, supporting himself with one hand whose fingers he twined with his brother’s, Thor bent to kiss his way down from the back of Loki’s neck to the scar beside his spine, while his other hand stroked down Loki’s chest from his throat to the scar along his breastbone, then along the tensed muscles of his stomach until it found Loki’s hardening cock.  Loki gasped and pushed his hips back against Thor’s, so that Thor’s own flushed and swollen prick rested against his cleft.  Thor straightened so that he could position himself and sink into that welcoming heat, then let himself fall back down to drape his body over his brother’s while he moved his hips in deep, unhurried strokes.

“This, this, this is what I’ve wanted, what I’ve missed,” Loki gasped out, then cut off with a sharp “oh!” when Thor’s cock brushed against the sensitive place inside him.

“Don’t tell me it’s the only thing you’ve missed,” Thor growled playfully.

“Of course I’ve been bereft without your—ah!—scintillating conversation.”

“I should hope so.”

“In all seriousness, though, I’ve missed—oh, fuck, Thor—I’ve missed having _conversations_ with you.  Real ones, honest ones.  I’ve missed… truth.”

So Thor cast aside all cautions and reservations and told him a truth: “I love you.”

“And if you ever doubt _my_ love again, you’re a much greater fool than I thought.”  How like Loki, to couch his confession of love in an insult.

“Never,” Thor promised him, then he wrapped his arm around Loki’s chest to pull them both upright.  Their bodies were molded together, so that Thor could feel the texture of Loki’s scars against his chest and stomach.  He felt himself wishing they could leave an imprint, like an engraver’s block upon paper—or, better, like a carved seal on wax.  “I wish I had been with you, had suffered those trials with you,” he whispered beside Loki’s ear.  “We were not meant to be apart.”

Thor could hear the strained smile in Loki’s voice as he said, “Perhaps it is as well that we learned we _can_ be apart, but we don’t want to.”  He laughed through a little sigh as Thor found his sweet spot again.  “And as for your wish… it is your pity that speaks again, and I will have none of it.  ‘My pain is _my_ pain: no one else is easily entitled to it.’  Let us take Nietzsche’s advice and learn ‘what so few understand, the preachers of pity least of all: _to share not suffering but joy_.’”

“I think we understand well enough how to share joy,” Thor said mischievously as he twisted his hand over the head of Loki’s cock, making him shudder and gasp.  “Though perhaps I’m not sharing quite enough of it if you’re still able to spout philosophy…”

“Well, then, brother, I challenge you: make me forget everything I know,” Loki panted as Thor began to drive into him harder.

“And I raise the stakes, _brother:_ I mean to make you forget how to think,” Thor growled with fierce delight.

With the arm still wrapped around Loki’s chest he pulled him in impossibly closer, then stroked his hand lovingly down Loki’s throat to trace the graceful line of his collarbones before pinching his nipple firmly enough to make him cry out.  He continued to fuck harder and faster until both of them were breathing harshly through their helpless groans.  “Brother, my brother,” Thor murmured, and Loki let out a sighing moan as if the words themselves were the source of his pleasure.

When they could no longer support themselves on their trembling legs, Thor let Loki collapse onto his elbows, his forehead resting on his crossed forearms as he all but whimpered out his pleasure, and Thor draped himself over his brother’s body again, one hand still caressing his prick.  He slowed his rhythm so that he could pull out farther and then thrust back in, feeling the head of his cock drag over the little nub of nerves with each slide.  Loki’s body had gone limp by the time he spent into Thor’s hand with a hoarse shout that sounded half like a sob.  Thor followed soon after, then collapsed onto Loki’s back when his arm could scarcely hold him up anymore, and clutched at his brother’s hands with his own.

“Have I met your challenge, brother?” Thor asked when he had recovered his breath enough to speak.

“Not a thought in my head,” Loki replied dazedly, muffled in his arms.

“Good.  That happens rarely enough,” Thor remarked as he rolled off his brother and stretched out beside him.

“I’ll expect you to administer this treatment regularly,” Loki said, his attempt to adopt a brisk tone undermined by the slurring of his words.  He unfolded himself laboriously and then nestled with his back against Thor’s chest.

“Gladly,” Thor said into Loki’s hair.  And for the first time in fourteen endless-seeming years, Thor folded his brother in his arms and they slept.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Attributions of Nietzsche quotes (translations slightly modified from Walter Kaufmann):  
> \- The bit about the virtues of the philosopher, "the bold, light, delicate gait of his thoughts" --> "the slow eye that rarely admires, rarely looks up, rarely loves—", is from the end of section 213 of _Beyond Good and Evil_.  
>  \- "My pain is _my_ pain; no one else is easily entitled to it" is adapted from _Beyond Good and Evil_ section 43: "My judgment is _my_ judgment: no one else is easily entitled to it."  
>  "...what so few understand, the preachers of pity least of all: _to share not suffering but joy_ " is from the end of section 338 of _The Gay Science_ , called "The will to suffer and those who feel pity."
> 
> The little bit about Loki getting turned on by Nietzsche is a callback to the first work in the series, [Desert Flowers](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5729293), as well as a semi-accurate report of my own feelings about Nietzsche's prose...


	3. Honesty

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thor and Loki take a few shaky steps toward a new life together in which they are honest with each other about their feelings and desires.

When Thor awoke, the dim light slanting through the window high on his bedroom wall was the dusky rose color that lingered past sunset.  As if nothing were out of the ordinary, he peeled himself away from Loki’s back where they were stuck together with a light sheen of sweat—and then a strange thrill shot through his stomach when he recalled that Loki was supposed to have been dead, but was miraculously alive; was supposed to have betrayed him, but had sought his forgiveness; was supposed to have left him, but was lying beside him again.  He looked down at his sleeping brother and marveled at the simple fact of his slow, even breathing, and dared to run light fingers through his tousled, sweat-damp hair.

At the touch, or perhaps at the removal of Thor’s warmth, Loki stirred, groaned, slowly opened his eyes.  He squinted up at the window to gauge the time, then groaned again and rolled over to face Thor.

“It’s later than I thought.  I should call for supper to be brought to my rooms.  The king’s rooms, I mean.  You can join me there.”

Thor grinned fondly at him and combed his fingers through Loki’s hair again, pausing to run his thumb lightly along the rim of his ear, which made Loki close his eyes and give a hum that was almost a purr.  “But I don’t think I’m finished with you yet,” Thor purred back.

Loki opened mischievous eyes and hummed again.  “Oh, I suppose I could go another round,” he said.  He wriggled closer to Thor, seeking his mouth, and flung an arm over his shoulder and a leg over his hip while they kissed.

Loki broke the kiss to turn onto his back and reach over to the bedside table for the jar of salve.  He scooped a little onto his fingers, rolled back onto his side, and started to reach between his legs, but Thor caught his wrist.

Loki turned his head to look at him in surprise.  “My turn,” Thor said gently but firmly.

Loki sighed.  “You don’t have to prove anything to me, Thor.”

Thor chuckled.  “Supposing for a moment that that were true—believe it or not, I enjoy being the one who receives as much as being the one who gives.”  Amused at Loki’s incredulous lift of eyebrows, Thor added, “Yes, blazon that abroad, why don’t you: the mighty Thor enjoys being fucked.”

Loki made a derisive noise, but then Thor turned serious.  “Aside from that, it’s apparent that I _do_ still have to prove to you that we are equals—that this is not a matter of you submitting to me, accepting my yoke or my chastisement.  Or accepting defeat.”

“And what if that’s what I wanted it to be?” Loki asked quietly, meeting his gaze briefly before lowering his eyes.

Thor’s heart stung.  “ _I_ don’t want that to be what is between us.  I don’t want you to ask that of me.”

“I cannot help what I want.”  Loki’s voice was low and chagrined.

“Nor can I,” Thor replied.  “And I want you to fuck me.”

He deliberately borrowed Loki’s words—words Loki had chosen, in the past, to shock and scandalize as much as to arouse.  Now Loki was, in spite of himself, aroused as much as scandalized, as Thor could see from the darkening of his eyes despite the tightening of his lips.

“Very well,” Loki said shortly, and brought his slicked fingers to Thor’s entrance instead of his own.

Thor had seen Loki open himself hurriedly, even carelessly, trying to disguise his winces as expressions of pleasure, when they were in a rush to taste each other—as when they had just sparred together on the training grounds and their blood was up in every way possible, or when they had only a short time before they were expected at some dull court function and they decided to alleviate the expected boredom with a touch of salacious risk.  Loki’s fingers were slower and far gentler with his brother; he met Thor’s eyes often, the unspoken question _Is this all right?_ in his gaze.  Sometimes Thor gave him a tiny nod in reply, before he added another finger or flexed and parted them; mostly his affirmation was, like Loki’s question, implicit in his warm, steady gaze.  _I love you,_ he wanted it to say, just like every one of his looks and actions from now on.  _It might not be all right now, but it will be someday.  I promise._

Loki removed his fingers and took up more of the salve to slick their cocks.  Before he pushed in, he gave Thor another questioning look, eyebrows raised.  “Yes,” Thor answered the silent question.

Thor’s body remembered better than his mind did how to let his brother in; almost by instinct, he bore down until Loki was fully sheathed.  Thor took a few deep breaths and then nodded again, and Loki started moving.  After the first thrust Loki closed his eyes and gave a broken moan.  Thor reached out to grasp his hips, as if to pull him deeper, then slid his hands over the taper of Loki’s waist and back down over the curves of his ass, feeling the way the muscles tensed and relaxed with his thrusts.

Thor raised his eyes from the spare lines of his brother’s body—pale and elegant as a marble statue come to life—to look at his face, and saw that his eyes were squeezed shut and his mouth twisted downward as if in pain.  Thor lifted one hand from Loki’s hip to cup his cheek; he brushed his thumb from the corner of Loki’s tightly closed eye to his temple, and it came away damp.

“Loki, brother, what is it?” he asked, a gentle croon.  He brought his other hand to Loki’s face, cradling it between his palms, and ran his thumbs over the sharp lines of his cheekbones, feeling the slight rasp of callused skin on smooth.

The movement of Loki’s hips stilled.  He seemed to be forcing his eyes open, and even then they were still narrowed as if Thor’s face were a light too bright to look at fully.  “I don’t deserve this,” he said hoarsely.  “I don’t deserve you.”

“You’re wrong,” Thor insisted, urgent, almost angry.  The look Loki returned to him was equal parts skeptical and pleading: _prove it to me,_ it said.

Carefully, Thor sat up and pulled away so that Loki’s cock slipped out of him.  Loki looked puzzled, but then Thor gently pushed him backward to lie on his back, took his cock in hand, and slid himself back onto it so that, poised upright like a rider, he had control of their movements.  He took Loki’s hands and laced their fingers together, then slowly began rolling his hips, grinning when Loki gave a slight involuntary gasp.

“You never knew how I worshiped you,” Thor rumbled softly as he rode.  “You were so beautiful, so graceful, yet so sharp—like one of your knives; like some great hunting cat.  The way you stalked what you wanted, silent and inexorable—ideas and knowledge as well as enemies and honors.  And you were so swift in the chase, body and mind.  Once you had reached my height, I could never keep up with you, in body or mind—not unless you slowed down, waited, and let me catch you.”

The crease between Loki’s brows gradually deepened as he spoke.  “You can’t mean it,” he finally burst out.

Pain seized Thor’s heart again, but he refused to let it show.  “Can’t I?” he replied, a gently playful challenge.

“You never… you never said any of that,” Loki stammered, his expression confused, almost distraught.  “You never showed it.”

“I didn’t know how,” Thor admitted, his voice aching with regret.  He let go of one of Loki’s hands to smooth a strand of hair back from his forehead, half hoping he could smooth the pained bewilderment from it as well.

“You could have just told me,” Loki said half-plaintively.

“And would you have believed me?”

Loki’s face all but crumpled, but he forced a wry smile through his hurt.  “Of course not.  Of course not.”

“But I should have said it anyway,” Thor said.

“Why?” Loki asked.  His voice was cracking, but he would not permit himself tears.  “What would have been the use?”

“There is always some good in speaking truth, is there not?”

Loki stared at him and then began laughing, a terrible joyless sound.  “Is there?  Are there not some truths that we would be better off never knowing, and never knowing that we didn’t know?  Some secrets that should never be spoken?”

Thor could think of two things Loki might be speaking of, and in either case the words grieved him beyond measure.  “Perhaps there are, but this is not one of them,” he declared, and began moving again, steadily, relentlessly.  “Even if your ears were as impervious as stone, I should nonetheless have rained my praises upon them day and night, unceasingly; even stone is worn away by the storms of centuries.”  He rolled his hips and tightened his muscles just so, making Loki gasp and then sigh.  “I should have told you every day how beautiful you were, how clever, how courageous—and not only on the battlefield, but in your tireless insistence on being _yourself_ , the seiðmaðr and scholar as well as the warrior, in spite of all disapproval and mockery.  I should have told you how I admired you, how feeble my own abilities seemed to me beside yours, how unworthy I felt to stand closer to the throne because of nothing more than an accident of birth.”

“But not only of birth _order,”_ Loki remarked dryly, before Thor effectively silenced him with another roll of his hips.

“But I promise you, I _will_ tell you, every day that we have left to us,” Thor continued.

“I expect that will become tiresome,” Loki quipped, but the blush high on his cheeks belied his unaffected air—or perhaps it was only the approach of his release.  He reached between them to wrap his hand around Thor’s cock, no doubt hoping to silence him in his turn.  “Perhaps it is as well that the days we have left to us are likely rather few.”

“Do not think you can escape me so easily,” Thor retorted, trying not to show his dismay at Loki’s continued insouciance about the prospect of death.  “I would make sure we live if for no other purpose than to keep telling you how I love and worship you.  Whether I must drag you into Valhalla or follow you into Hel—as I have promised—I will keep this promise as well.”

“I still don’t believe you,” Loki panted, then he could hold back no longer, and his mouth opened in a silent cry as his hips shuddered beneath Thor’s.  Loki’s grip on Thor’s cock loosened and lost its rhythm as the rush of sensation overtook him, so Thor eased his hand away to finish himself.  His seed spilled over Loki’s chest, white on white.  It looked right to him, not as a mark or claim of ownership on his brother, but as a libation poured out to his god.  Loki, as ever, vanished it with an unthinking wave of his hand: a dismissal of his devotee’s offering.

Thor rose on trembling thighs, then lowered himself beside his brother and leaned down to kiss him, light but lingering.  “I know,” he said against Loki’s lips once they had parted.  “I know.  I must still do much to gain your trust.”

“And here I’d thought that was my line,” Loki said wryly.

Thor smiled and stroked a thumb over the curve of Loki’s shoulder.  “Stop running,” he whispered against Loki’s neck, and felt him shiver in response.  “Let me catch you.”

Loki gave a slightly nervous laugh.  “Well, I’m not going anywhere at the moment,” he said, and at once belied his words by pulling away slightly.

He stretched out his arms and legs, wrists flexed and toes pointed; once more he reminded Thor of nothing so much as of a great cat.  “I’m hungry,” he remarked after shaking out his limbs, sounding almost surprised to realize it.

“We have both been ‘getting a workout,’ as my Midgardian friends might put it.”

“Dinner,” Loki announced decisively.  “Or perhaps it is ‘supper’ at this hour.”  He sat up, spotted his trousers lying further down the bed, and stood to pull them on, then looked around for the rest of his clothing before he remembered that it was on the floor on the other side of the bed.  Thor, still recovering his energy after his recent exertion, lay watching him with amused affection through heavy-lidded eyes, until Loki shot him a sharp look and reminded him, “You also need to be wearing clothes if you intend to join me.”

“Yes, yes,” Thor sighed before he sat up with a groan and reached for his own trousers.

“And you need to be wearing clothes when you open the door for me,” Loki pointed out.  “I don’t want any maids thinking they’ve seen your door open and close for a ghost.  If anyone sees you open the door, follow me to the king’s chambers, but at a slower pace, so that I arrive before you.”

“Norns, you think of everything, don’t you?” Thor said with fond exasperation.

“Maintaining a false identity is complicated!” Loki pointed out.  “It’s hard work, all that plotting and scheming, but we poor underappreciated villains never get any credit for it.”

Thor snorted.  “More reasons you should be king rather than me.  I haven’t the mind for plotting and scheming.”

“Oh, I think you have the mind, if you really applied yourself,” Loki said coolly.  “What you lack is the patience.”  He’d finished dressing, and was adjusting the lay of his sleeve under his vambrace while he waited for Thor to finish lacing the sleeveless tunic he had chosen to wear to supper—there was no need to trouble with the full armor again.

When Thor, too, was fully dressed, he nodded to Loki, who instantly vanished.  Thor opened the outer door of his chambers; as it happened, no one was in the hall, so after a murmured “I’m out” from Loki, Thor closed the door again behind him to wait a few minutes before following.

He puttered restlessly around his room, carefully folding his cloak and putting away his armor, straightening the bedding… There was something that had come up several times in his conversation with Loki that still unsettled him, and he thought he might have hit upon a way of addressing it, but he was uncertain about how to bring it up, or how Loki would react.  He rehearsed possible versions while he paced around his room, and then while he made his way through the halls of the palace to the quarters that had once belonged to his parents, then just to his father, and were now being occupied by his brother in his father’s guise.

He tapped on one of the double doors, which were of the same rich dark wood as the door to his own chambers, but larger, carved with the bas-relief of a nine-branched tree, its upper branches and the tops of its leaves lined with beaten gold as if limned with sunlight.  “Enter,” said his father’s voice from within, and his heart jumped into his throat even though he knew well it was not Odin who spoke.

He opened the door and walked through the large and comfortably appointed vestibule, which served as a waiting area for honored guests who were invited to speak with the king in the intimate audience chamber attached to his own rooms, or even to share a meal in his private dining room.  When he entered the audience chamber, he saw Odin—no, he had to remind his eyes, Loki wearing Odin’s form—rise from a chair to greet him with a sly smile and beckon him into the dining room, which opened onto a well-shaded terrace.  Thor’s throat tightened when he looked out into the courtyard, which also adjoined the queen’s own apartments; Frigga used to tend the flowers here, and had usually chosen to break her fast in this courtyard when the weather was fine.  The little garden was still well-kept, but it seemed to Thor to lack the _character_ that Frigga had brought to it, the mark of her distinctive taste.

He had arrived in perfect time, it seemed, for efficient, solemn-faced kitchen attendants were just now laying their supper out on the table.  Loki-as-Odin thanked them politely, Thor in turn murmured his own thanks, and they bowed and departed through a discreet side door.  Once they were alone, Loki let the glamor fall and said with a smirk, “I imagine that will keep your hands away from me for the next few hours, at least.”

Thor returned his smile uncomfortably.  “Please, let’s not even connect those ideas…”

Loki laughed, then walked over to the table.  He lifted the lid of a silver tureen, which turned out to contain a venison stew, no doubt made from roasted meat left over from the midday meal in the palace’s great hall, generously spiced and mixed with vegetables and dried fruit.  A cloth-covered tray held a loaf of bread and a dish of soft butter, and a variety of fresh fruit lay in a wide silver bowl.

“Which wine would pair best with a sweet-savory venison stew?” Loki wondered, clearly talking to himself, because Thor had no thoughts at all on the subject.  Loki wandered over to a tall gold-and-glass cabinet, enchanted to stay slightly cooler than the rest of the room, and scrutinized the bottles inside.  Thor sat down at the table and drummed his fingers idly until Loki at last selected a bottle made of dark glass and covered in dust and returned to the table with it.

“Masquerading as Odin has some unexpected advantages,” Loki remarked as he wiped some of the dust off the bottle with a napkin, then used a fruit knife to cut a wax seal off the neck of the bottle and pulled out its stopper.

Thor’s lips were pressed together in a tight line.  “I wish you wouldn’t make so light of it.  I understand why you’re angry—yes, yes, only as far as I can ever understand—but I still think you’ve done a grievous wrong.  Which you must now help me to repair.”

Loki’s eyes narrowed as Thor spoke, and he pressed his lips together even more tightly (if possible) than Thor had.  His voice made Thor think of knife-sharp shards of ice being chipped off a jagged block when he said, “And what if doing what I did was a necessary means toward stopping Thanos?”

Thor shook his head stubbornly.  “I still think there was another way.  You should have told me sooner what you have just told me.  You should have come to me for help.”

“You still have no idea what we’ll be dealing with,” Loki snapped, not looking at Thor as he poured some wine into his glass—but not Thor’s—and then began dishing stew from the tureen into his own bowl.

“Something we can confront and defeat together, as we always have,” Thor told him firmly.

“Always… until I fucked it all up,” Loki said bitterly.  He replaced the ladle in the tureen far more forcefully than was called for, and red-brown sauce spattered the golden tablecloth.  It reminded Thor of an old bloodstain.

Thor put a calming hand over Loki’s and felt it trembling, so slightly that he had not been able to see it.  “None of this now.  I do not wish to quarrel.  What’s past is past; what remains for us now is to prepare as best we can for what is to come.  And that includes eating.”

Loki cracked a small reluctant smile at Thor’s last remark, then slid his hand out from under Thor’s to reach for his spoon.  “I think we can agree that eating is our best first step.”

They ate mostly in silence, except for idle remarks on the food or requests for something to be passed.  After trying the wine Loki noted, “It tastes younger than I would have expected, given the age of the bottle.”

“Oh,” said Thor.  He had little idea of what it meant for a wine to taste young.  “It’s very good” was all he could contribute.

“I’d wanted something softer to compliment the sweetness of the stew,” Loki complained.

“It works just fine.  I’m sure I would have been happy with anything you had chosen.”

Loki gave him a sidelong look.  “If I had chosen a steely white, even _you_ would have noticed that it didn’t work.”

“Perhaps, but you _wouldn’t_ have chosen it.”

“True.”

After a lull, Thor decided it was a decent time to raise the issue he had wanted to speak about.  While walking from his rooms, he had decided that the best way to approach it was from the side rather than head-on, so that Loki would not have time to put him off or become defensive.

Thor cleared his throat—which he realized was a bad idea as soon as he had done it, because it already alerted Loki that he was about to say something that he considered important and was anxious about bringing up—and said with affected casualness, “My friend Stark—Tony Stark, the Iron Man—has told me of an interesting custom among some Midgardians.”

Loki coolly raised his eyebrows.  Clearly he sensed that this was no incidental comment; Thor had an agenda.  “What custom is that?” he asked with a similar feigned casualness.

“It is a… a peculiar sexual practice—though it need not only be sexual,” Thor added, and felt his face flushing.  “The partners imagine themselves playing roles in a fictional scenario.  In which… typically… one is in a position of power over the other.  Often with the power to inflict pain—in limited amounts, of course.”

Loki’s eyebrows rose even higher.  “Are you looking to add spice to our sex life, brother?”  On the surface, his tone was playful, but a current of suspicion ran underneath it.

Thor cleared his throat again.  “No, but… I thought perhaps you were.”

Loki’s expression was frozen.  “Oh?”

“You—you’ve been saying these strange things about wanting me to hurt you, or—or take you against your will, and I don’t understand why, or like it particularly, but I thought… since there are others who like to _pretend_ such things, in a safe and controlled way—there are words they agree on, strange words that they wouldn’t say by accident, and if one of them says the chosen word, they stop the… the ‘scene,’ they call it.  Not ‘no’ or ‘stop,’ so that those can be said as part of the fiction without bringing it to an end…”

Loki’s jaw was clenched and his face was even whiter than it usually was, particularly around the edges of his lips.  “Don’t patronize me,” he said.  His voice was quiet, but the force with which he enunciated the words made Thor think of his throwing knives landing in wood.

“I’m not!” Thor protested.  “I want to help, truly…”

“Yes, that’s what patrons do,” Loki sneered.

“Loki, please help me understand what you want, why you say these things…”

“I want what I have said I want, nothing more or less,” Loki said icily.  “If you cannot give me that—and I suspect it is impossible, regardless of what you were willing to do—then you cannot.  It was a wise Midgardian philosopher, I believe, who observed that ‘you can’t always get what you want.’”

Thor wasn’t sure where Loki had heard these words or why he thought they were a philosopher’s, but as it happened, Thor had heard the song of which they were the refrain, as it was one of Stark’s favorites (“It kind of feels like the story of my life,” he had told Thor dryly one time when it was playing in the common room of Avengers Tower).

Thor took a gamble.  “Since you have expressed irritation in the past about scholars quoting their sources out of context,” he said carefully, “I would remind you that the rest of the adage runs: ‘but if you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you need.’”

Loki stared at him for a long moment, and Thor feared he was about to have his head ripped off (most likely metaphorically, but with Loki one could never be sure).  But then Loki said in an arch tone, “You are entirely correct.  How inconsistent of me.”

“You’ll try it, then?” Thor asked anxiously.  “I’ll need to ask Stark where it is best to go for instruction in these practices…”

Alarm flared in Loki’s eyes.  “You wouldn’t tell him about us,” he said sharply, not quite a question.

“Of course not!” Thor assured him hurriedly.  “No, I’d say I was just asking for myself.  Or perhaps myself and Jane.  That isn’t too far-fetched, now that I come to think of it…”

Loki’s lips were pinched again.  “Please don’t tell me things like that.  And I haven’t said I’d try anything.”

“But you’ll think about it?” Thor coaxed him.

“Now that you’ve put the image in my head of Stark engaging in such practices, I doubt I’ll be able to _stop_ thinking about it.”

Thor couldn’t tell if that was disgust in Loki’s tone or a peculiar fascination.  He chose to push the latter idea out of his mind.  “That’s a start,” he said with a small playful smile.

“Hmph,” was all Loki said in reply.  Then, “I should call for these dishes to be removed.”

“Not yet,” Thor cajoled.  “They will keep.”  He did not want to see Loki wearing their father’s face again, and not only because it ‘spoiled the mood,’ in the Midgardian idiom.

“Actually, the leftover meat probably won’t keep,” Loki said dryly.

Must he always be thinking in practicalities?  Yes, he must, Thor reflected, or he would not fare nearly so well either as a trickster or as a king.  He sighed.  “I’m going to another room, then, so I needn’t see you with the glamor again.  Tell them to leave the fruit,” he added as an afterthought.

He heard Loki make a soft snorting sound as he retreated into the bedroom, before he closed the door behind him.  The sight of the great golden-canopied four-poster bed brought a flood of aching memories, of running to his parents’ room as a young child when he had had a bad dream or felt ill in the night or was especially restless in the early morning.  In his earliest memories, Loki was still an infant in a cradle alongside his parents’ bed; he had no memories from before Loki had arrived.  No wonder he had never thought to ask why he had never seen his mother pregnant with his younger brother.

It occurred to him that no matter how uncomfortable he felt now with the idea of making love to his brother in their parents’ bed, one of them would eventually be king, and this room would be his by right.  Nor did he wish to replace the magnificent bed that had belonged to their parents and grandparents; it was part of their inheritance, a piece of the history and tradition that permeated every room of the royal palace.  If he was true to his word about being determined to make some kind of a life with Loki, somehow, perhaps he should get used to the idea of this bed as theirs.  Not right away, of course; at first it would belong to whichever of them became king and the woman he took to wife for the purpose of making alliances and an heir.  But someday, perhaps.  Even Loki, with all his blunt practicality, could not make Thor give up that hope.

He sat at the foot of the bed and wondered what their parents would think.  His father… their father could never know.  He would not understand.  He would only be horrified, or disappointed.  Perhaps he would disown them both and let their cousin Balder inherit.  And they needn’t worry that he wouldn’t live long enough to groom Balder to take up the kingship; Odin would manage to live that long purely out of spite.

But their mother… Frigga would be shocked, probably, and might grieve that their brotherhood had been bent away from what it ought to have been.  But she would not let it alienate her from her sons.  She loved them unreservedly, and once she realized that this was no perverse adolescent whim, she would come to accept it.  That thought reassured him that it was no betrayal of her memory to make use of the bed that had been hers.  But he did not think he wanted to share these thoughts with Loki—not yet, anyway.

After a few minutes, the door opened and Loki came in, wearing his own form and a sly grin, and carrying the bowl of fruit and the little silver paring knife it had come with.  “Since you made a point of asking that they leave the fruit, I figured that you must have some sinful intent regarding it.”

Thor, who had been quite thoroughly engrossed in his reflections, jumped and then laughed.  “Not really,” he admitted.  “I just thought it would make a refreshing dessert.  But now that you mention it…”

Loki set the bowl down on a small table-cum-curio cabinet, took a few pieces of fruit into his hand to test them for ripeness, and at last selected a wine-red plum, a bunch of bright green grapes, and an apple whose coloring faded from scarlet on one side through a blush of pink to pale green on the other.

“Striking a balance between our favored colors?” Thor asked, amused, as Loki approached the bed with the plum and the grapes in one hand and the apple and the knife in the other.

Loki looked down at the fruit in his hands and laughed.  “Not intentionally.  Just a well-balanced range of options, I thought.”

He set everything on the bedside table, shucked off his boots, and seated himself against the pillows while Thor crawled up from the foot of the bed to join him.

“Shall I feed my king grapes in his bed?” Loki asked, putting on a tone of servility with an undercurrent of mockery.

“I’m not your king,” Thor protested with a discomfited laugh.  “I’m not anyone’s king.”

“Pretend for me, would you?  And open your mouth,” Loki added, gesturing toward Thor’s face with the grape in his fingers.

Thor obeyed, somewhat reluctantly.  “What, you didn’t peel them first?” he chided, playing along, after he had chewed and swallowed.

Loki looked scandalized.  “But what would be the point of a grape without that satisfying _pop_ as the juice bursts from the skin?”

“Something tells me you’re not just talking about grapes anymore,” Thor said around the second one.

“Don’t talk with your mouth full, br— excuse me, Your Majesty,” Loki scolded him.  “And what in Yggdrasil could I be talking about other than grapes?  I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”

“Oh, I’m sure,” Thor said before Loki put the third grape in his mouth.  But Thor had ideas of his own; he held it lightly between his teeth and brought his mouth to Loki’s, then bit down on the grape so that its juice filled the space shared by their mouths.

When Loki pulled away he was coughing a little, having apparently inhaled some of the grape juice.  “Better in theory than in execution,” he remarked.  “Those aren’t really shareable.  These others would work better,” he said, his hand hovering over the plum and the apple.  “Though the plum would probably make a mess.  And we wouldn’t want to get red juice all over these lovely golden sheets…”

That was definitely some kind of a challenge, but Thor wasn’t taking the bait.  “We both know that’s not a problem for you.”

Loki pouted, just a little.  “Cleaning liquids from skin is one thing, but it’s such a pain to get them out once they’ve soaked into the weave of the fabric…”

“For a master magician like you?  I find that hard to believe.”

“More of a pain.”

All right, Thor was taking the bait.  “Then we probably wouldn’t want to get it on our clothes, either.”

“No indeed,” said Loki, returning his mischievous smile.

In businesslike fashion, Thor shed his tunic and Loki his tunic and undershirt (he had dispensed with the coat before Thor arrived), though they left their trousers on for the sake of some appearance of self-control.  Loki took a first bite of the plum, letting just a drop of juice trickle from the corner of his mouth down his chin, and Thor obediently licked it off, his tongue tracing in reverse the path it had taken.

Loki then held the plum out to Thor, but when he tried to take it with his fingers, held it away with a taunting “Ah, ah.”  Thor grinned and took his bite of the plum directly from Loki’s hand.  Predictably, given the awkward angle, juice dribbled into his beard and a large drop landed with a soft _splat_ in the center of his chest.  With a hungry glint in his eye, Loki licked away the latter, and Thor gave a soft gasp; though Loki’s tongue had been nowhere near his nipples, he felt them harden as gooseflesh radiated from the tingling line Loki had traced.

“I don’t think you’re finished,” Thor warned when Loki moved to take another bite.

Loki frowned.  “What am I supposed to do, lick it out of your hair like a cat?”  He attempted just that, but the grain of Thor’s beard rasped against his tongue and he pulled away with an exaggerated gagging noise, scraping hairs out of his mouth.  Thor chuckled unsympathetically at his predicament.  Loki scrutinized the situation with a thoughtful hum, then tried sipping the plum juice out of Thor’s beard.  Thor laughed at the tickle of the air he pulled into his lips and the loud slurping noises that resulted, but it worked far better than the previous attempt.  “All right, that’s enough,” Thor told him, still laughing, and Loki turned his attention back to the partly eaten plum.

Now that its skin had been breached, the ripe flesh was all but bursting out of it, and juice had been running unattended from Loki’s hand down his arm and was now in danger of dripping off his elbow onto the sheets.  “Thor!” he called, feigning alarm, and lifted his elbow to bring the problem to Thor’s attention.  Thor lunged to the rescue and licked up the precarious drop, then once more followed the trail up to its origin, marveling as he went at the strangely graceful bones of Loki’s wrist and the latent power of the sinewy tendons that stood out from it.  He licked all the way up to the base of Loki’s palm and let his tongue linger in the dip between his thumb and the rest of his fingers, but Loki pulled his hand away before he could bring his mouth to the fruit itself.

Loki took another bite and showily let the juice drip from his mouth over his chin, along the underside of his jaw, and down the length of his neck.  Again, Thor started where the juice had gathered in the hollow of his throat—he felt as much as heard Loki’s breathily voiced gasp—and followed it back up, along the delicate contours of his neck, over the sharp angle of his jaw, back to his slender lips, unexpectedly soft despite the austerity of their shape.  He kept licking all the way over the threshold of Loki’s lower lip until he found his tongue, and tasted the sweetness of the plum still lingering there.  Loki gasped again before letting his mouth close over Thor’s, giving himself to the kiss.

He broke away to say breathlessly, “We’re going to make a mess…”  The plum was dripping down his arm again, and Thor efficiently cleaned up the juice again with his tongue before putting the rest of the fruit in his mouth, sucking the flesh away from the pit, and spitting the pit into his hand to place on the bedside table.  He grasped the hand with which Loki had been holding the fruit and licked the palm thoroughly, then ran his tongue gently over the sensitive web of flesh between each pair of long, elegant fingers.  Loki’s moans reminded Thor that in future he needed to devote far more time and attention to his brother’s hands, a prospect to which Thor did not object in the least.

“Well!  The apple should be much less messy,” Loki said when Thor had relinquished his hand and he had recovered some of his composure.  He picked up the apple and the fruit knife and regarded them thoughtfully.  “Should I cut along the line where the color changes?  The red half for you, the green half for me?”

“No, cut it crosswise,” Thor replied.

“So we both get a little of each of us,” Loki finished with a laugh in his voice.  He held the apple in his left hand and halved it deftly with his right, stopping the blade just short of the palm where it rested… until, after a slight pause that let Thor know it was not an accident, he let the knife slice a bit farther.  “Oops,” he said, a little too knowingly.

Thor took the knife from his hand, set it on the table, and parted the halves of the apple to see where Loki had made a thin, shallow cut down the base of his palm.  Loki looked up at him, a dare in his glinting green eyes.  Thor placed one half of the apple in Loki’s right hand, then took his left wrist delicately between his fingers and, never letting his eyes leave Loki’s, licked up the blood that had begun to well in the wound.  When it started to bleed even more freely, he pressed his lips to it and sucked gently while pressing his tongue against the cut to staunch the flow.

The slight smile that hovered about Loki’s lips broadened.  “Yes, I think you’ll do,” he said archly, before taking a bite of the apple.

Thor pulled his mouth away from the cut on Loki’s hand and licked away the bit of blood that remained on his lips; its iron tang, oddly enough, seemed to harmonize with the taste of the grapes and the plum.  “I will, will I?”  He set aside his half of the apple and moved over Loki, placing one knee between his legs, to kiss him and press onto his tongue the taste of his own blood that lingered on Thor’s.  Loki moaned again into the kiss, and his chest rose noticeably as he drew in a sharp breath through his nose.  Thor could feel against his thigh how hard Loki had grown, and his own prick was beginning to beg for attention.

“So, you don’t object to using our parents’ bed?” Loki asked, sounding somewhat desperate, when they parted.

“Not that much,” Thor said, and quickly began unlacing Loki’s trousers.  He didn’t explain the full thought process that had reconciled him to the idea, but he did point out, “Even if we had all conducted ourselves in accordance with law, tradition, and virtue, I still would have had to get used to fucking my wife in our parents’ bed.”  Loki laughed at that; Thor hoped he only imagined that it sounded slightly pained.

He began to slide down the bed with the aim of taking Loki in his mouth, but Loki put a hand on his shoulder to stop him.  “No, just—take us both in your hand.  It’s big enough for that, if I recall.”

It was something they had often done early on, before they were entirely comfortable with penetrative sex.  Wrapping his hand around both of their cocks was not quite as pleasurable or effective as a hand around only one of them, but there was a strange thrill, a peculiar intimacy, in feeling their lengths pressed together, and watching the very same gesture bring them both to completion almost simultaneously.

So Thor lay on his side facing his brother and did as Loki commanded.  He pressed his mouth to Loki’s at almost the same moment that he closed his hand around their pricks and swallowed Loki’s soft sigh of relief.  He felt Loki reach around his shoulder to grip his hair and wondered idly if his palm was still bleeding before deciding that he didn’t care.  Loki’s body undulated against him, lithe and sinuous, while his own was still but for a few sharp involuntary pulses of his hips; unbidden, the image came to him of a wild grapevine winding around the trunk of an oak, and the taste of sugar and iron in Loki’s mouth only reinforced it.

Loki’s left hand tightened in Thor’s hair while his right, pressed against the bed, clutched at Thor’s shoulder just before his body tensed, inching closer to Thor’s as it did, and he spilled over Thor’s hand.  The tremors of Loki’s orgasm, the tug at his hair that sent shivers across Thor’s scalp, the little whimper that Loki pressed into Thor’s mouth along with his increasingly demanding kisses—all of these seemed to go straight to Thor’s groin, and he spent soon after.

Still breathing hard, Loki untangled his hand from Thor’s hair and, with a soft surge of green light, removed the spend from Thor’s hand and their bellies as well as the remaining stickiness of plum juice from their skin and the drying blood from his own palm.  Then he sighed and nestled closer to Thor, resting his head on the palm that Thor had laid out on the pillow as an invitation, letting Thor stroke one thumb over his cheek and run the other hand lightly along the line of his body, up the slope of his thigh and over the slight jut of his hip to the valley of his waist and the rise of his ribcage with his breathing.

“I adore you,” Thor said, still wondering at the miracle that lay beside him.  His presence, the very breath that lifted his ribs, was a miracle.

“Not this again,” Loki sighed, putting on an air of irritation to mask a different sort of unease.

“I’m only speaking my mind,” Thor insisted.  “I want us to be fully honest with each other from now on.”

Loki snorted.  “Are you sure you know what you’re getting yourself into?”

“No, I’m not,” Thor admitted freely.

Loki laughed with surprised delight.  “Well, there’s a start to our future honesty.”

“Yes,” Thor agreed.  “There’s a start.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The joke about "You Can't Always Get What You Want" was a nod to the TV show _House, M.D._ , in which House attributes that bit of wisdom to "the philosopher Jagger."
> 
> The excessive detail about wine pairing was just me being self-indulgent, as usual. If it isn't philosophy, it's wine.
> 
> The messing around with fruit (plums in particular) and knives was pretty much entirely due to the corrupting influence of excellent Thorki writer and fellow Loki enthusiast [darklittlestories](http://archiveofourown.org/users/darklittlestories/pseuds/darklittlestories). Love you, dear :)


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